Col Jeff Smith (Lt Col USAF Retired) is the Department Head for the Department of Economics and Business. He is the General Edwin Cox ’20 Institute Professorship in Economics and History. He earned a PhD in Economics from the University of Tennessee in 2004 while serving on Active Duty in the United States Air Force. Since that time, he has served as a professor at both the graduate and undergraduate level. He has 17 peer-reviewed publications, one National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, two book chapters, and he published an open-access textbook used in Business Finance classes at VMI. He continues to serve as a consultant, providing economic analysis and expert testimony, including a recent analysis for the state of Indiana regarding the Public Deposit Insurance Fund. He is a regular contributor to the “Ask the Expert” series on personal finance issues hosted on the popular personal finance website Wallethub