WASHINGTON — The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board is establishing a formal Academic Program as part of its mission to support scholars and other researchers.
The program will create a Visiting Scholar position to expand the regulator's municipal securities data research, the MSRB said Monday in a press release. The scholar will do in-depth analyses based on the MSRB’s muni market data and other sources. The Washington-based candidate will be an active faculty member of a college or university and will have or be working toward a Ph.D. or MA in finance, accounting, economics, public policy, statistics or mathematics.
“This is just the next logical step in that, which is really making sure that if we get an academic on staff, they’re sort of embedded within the MSRB," said MSRB President and CEO Lynnette Kelly.
The Academic Program already provides municipal market data sets to universities and other research institutions looking to conduct research about the municipal securities market.
“We’ve always been interested in academic research in the municipal market," Kelly said. "It’s an area that has not necessarily been a focus in the academic community so we want to do whatever we can to encourage that.”
In 2016, the MSRB began an agreement with WRDS (Wharton Research Data Services) with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It provides financial and economic data to 400 global institutions including corporate, academic, government and nonprofit users.
The MSRB is active at the annual Brookings Municipal Finance Conference and convened an academic round table earlier in the year.
For years, the MSRB has provides access to data products, including historical sets of trade data, primary market and continuing disclosures and information relating to variable rate securities.
