Ingo Walter

Ingo Walter has been based almost all of his professional career at New York University, in a hub-and-spoke strategy that included periods of residency at Insead, the University of Mannheim, the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, IESE in Spain, the University of Western Australia and others.

At NYU he chaired several academic departments, directed the Salomon Center for the Study of Financial Institutions for thirteen years, and served two four-year sentences as Vice Dean of Academic Affairs and more recently Dean of Faculty. For almost 20 years he held a co-appointment at INSEAD. Since 2015 he has been an active Professor Emeritus at Stern.

His early academic and consulting work focused on international trade policy, notably the impact of tariffs and non-tariff barriers on developing country trade and growth. This led to work on trade and the natural environment – how environmental policy developments can be built into the generally accepted models of global production in a book titled International Economics of Pollution (McMillan)1975) – and a Bellagio conference on international trade in recyclables. A bit later he focused on non-market constraints facing foreign direct investment in a co-authored volume Multinationals Under Fire (Wiley, 1980) which covered many of the ESG concerns widely discussed today.

The focus on trade and investment led him naturally to market-access issues in the financial services industry, and an effort to understand the structure, conduct and performance of its main functional pillars – commercial banking, securities, insurance and asset management – in all their complexity considered in Street Smarts (Harvard Business School Press, 1997).

The work had both firm-specific and public policy dimensions, including systemic and firm-specific risk control issues and problems that surfaced in the Global Financial Crisis. This included a major NYU faculty team effort on crisis forensics and remediation to achieve a sustainable balance between financial efficiency and stability. Most recently he has been engaged in a multi-disciplinary study of infrastructure finance, as well as extending his work on reputational risk.

Ingo has served on a number of boards, currently the Board of Directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has advised various industrial and financial firms and government agencies.

Visit https://www.aib.world/frontline-ib/ingo-walter/ for the original video interview.