Title: Vice President, Senior Credit Officer
Firm: Moody’s Investors Service
Age: 39
Baye Larsen is a credit analyst on the state ratings team at Moody’s, where she’s worked for 14 years.
She assigns credit ratings to debt issued by five states: New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Idaho, and North Dakota.
“Our team takes the approach of just trying to have some diversity to the analysts so there’s no regional concentration, no common theme to the states that we’re assigned,” she said. “It’s a balance of the frequency of issuance as well as the high profile nature of the states. They try to get a blend for each analyst.”
Baye also is the lead analyst for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Agency, which operates the New York City subway and buses as well as two commuter rail lines.
She gets a close-up look at operations on one of them, Metro-North Railroad, during her daily commute to Manhattan from her home in Darien, Connecticut. The other is the Long Island Rail Road.
The third commuter rail line carrying passengers daily into Manhattan, New Jersey Transit, is also part of her rating portfolio.
Baye sees “very different pushes and pulls” across her portfolio's debt issuance and issuers she rates. “The economic trajectory of Oregon has been very different from New Jersey, for example,” she said. “And North Dakota, even though they are not a very large issuer, their oil recession in 2016 was a fascinating cycle to watch. Across the states it’s fascinating to see how the different policy approaches and different budgeting approaches play out.”
In addition to her credit work, she participates in employee resource groups, including a term as co-chair of the Women’s Employee Resource Group policy task force.
She also has contributed to Moody’s methodologies. She was the lead author of the mass transit enterprises methodology released in 2017 and a contributor to the intercept methodology in 2017. Baye has a leadership role in several internal task forces, including the global P3 task force and the PFG cybersecurity task force.
Married with three children, Baye earned an undergraduate degree in government from Georgetown University and a master’s in public administration from New York University’s Wagner School.
