Jeffrey Ian Chapman [January 16, 1944 – June 27, 2022] was Emeritus Foundation Professor of Applied Public Finance, School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University. His research focused mainly on local government fiscal stress, revenue structure, and tax incentives. His degrees in economics were an A.B. from Occidental College (1967) and both the M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1971), with the dissertation on a model of crime and police output, from the University of California, Berkeley. He did a post-doc at UCLA (1971), a faculty rank at the University of Southern California (1973-1999) where he was director of the Sacramento Center (1982-1986; 1997-1998), before joining Arizona State University (1999-2013) as director of the School of Public Affairs (1999-2003) and interim dean (2004-2005). He conducted significant work with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and was a member of the Arizona Economic Round Table and on the board of the Grand Canyon Institute. His books include Proposition 13 and Land Use (1981), Long Term Financial Planning: Creative Strategies for Local Government (1987), and The Local Budget as a Complex System (2022).
Paul Posner [1947 – July 5, 2017] was director of the George Mason University’s Scar School of Policy and Government (2005-2017) and made valuable contributions to understanding the budgetary aspects of federalism. He authored The Politics of Unfunded Mandates (1998) which received the 2008 Martha Derthick Best Book Award given by Section on Federalism and Intergovernmental Management of the American Political Science Association, from which also he received their Daniel J. Elazar Distinguished Scholar award (2017). Numerous articles and reports included the 2001 Burkhead award-winning article in Public Budgeting & Finance. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and worked for the New York City budget bureau. He served for 30 years with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, where he achieved leadership positions. He was a former president of the ASPA (2010-2011) and ABFM (2000-2001), and a Fellow (1996) and Chair of the Board of the NAPA (2016-2017). He received AABPA’s Blum Award (2005) and ABFM’s Howard Award (2009) and, in his honor, ABFM created in 2018 the Posner Award for a lifetime achievement for significant contributions made to the field of budgeting and financial management as both a practitioner and an academic (2018).