Special Briefing on Boosting Infrastructure Investment for Global Cities: Lessons from the $4 Trillion U.S. Municipal Bond Market

America’s state and local governments finance more than three-quarters of the nation’s public infrastructure needs, while in many other countries, most capital investment funds flow from central to local governments and borrowing from banks and capital markets may be limited. This practice is in sharp contrast to the U.S., where states and municipalities are expected to borrow at least $600 billion in 2026, mostly backed by locally generated tax and fee revenues, in a $4 trillion nationwide municipal securities market that dates back to New York City’s first muni bond sale in 1812. 

Join our Special Briefing as co-hosts William Glasgall and Susan Wachter discuss with global public finance experts how global cities and other subnational governments may be able to adopt attributes of America’s muni market structure and create more of a credit-driven culture to drive private investment in badly needed public infrastructure to meet the demands of population growth and climate change. 

Panelists include: 

• Emily S. Brock, Director, Federal Liaison Center, Government Finance Officers Association;
• Alexander Chilton, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley Fixed Income & Commodities; 
• Sean Dougherty, Senior Advisor at Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and leader of the Secretariat of the Network on Fiscal Relations across Levels of Government;
• Pietrangelo DiBiase, OECD policy analyst; and
• Paul Smoke, Director at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC) and Professor of Public Finance and Planning, NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Moderated by William Glasgall, Volcker Alliance Public Finance Adviser and Penn IUR Fellow, and Susan Wachter, Co-Director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research and Wharton Professor of Real Estate and Professor of Finance, this briefing is the 69th in a series of sixty-minute online conversations featuring experts from the national research networks of the Volcker Alliance and Penn IUR, along with other leading academics, economists, and federal, state, and local leaders. 

Special Briefings are made possible by funding from The Travelers Institute, the Volcker Alliance, and members of the Penn IUR Advisory Board. Recordings of the entire Special Briefings series are available on the Volcker Alliance or Penn IUR websites. 

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