Martin Luby (Ph.D. '10)
Ph.D., Public Affairs, 2010“Why would you leave a lucrative job on Wall Street to study public affairs?”
It’s a question recent SPEA graduate Martin Luby is often asked about his career path. Most people can’t imagine advancing from an analyst position at Bear Stearns to senior vice president at a leading financial strategies firm in Chicago, only to give it all up for an academic career. But then to choose public affairs over business school? That move doesn’t seem financially strategic at all.
For Luby, though, public finance has always been an enriching topic. From his first position as a financial analyst through his senior executive role, he always focused on municipal and other government projects, forgoing corporate mergers for public-private partnerships and tax-exempt bonds. The payoff came from helping struggling government agencies stay afloat and finding ways to successfully merge the public and private sectors.
After a decade of this work, however, Luby became more interested in the processes underlying these operations than in the contracts themselves.
“I got tired of working on deals and transactions,” he says. “I was more interested in the policy end of public finance where it intersects with public management. A lot of my experience was in consulting with debt managers, and I was interested in why they made their decisions – what their influences and incentive structures were.”
Luby started searching for the best institution at which to pursue this type of research, and was blown away by SPEA faculty members like Craig Johnson, John Mikesell, and Kurt Zorn. He was also thrilled to discover that SPEA, unlike any other school he found, offered courses in his interest area of debt finance. With two children at home, he couldn’t quit working to enroll in the program, but he was determined to get the best education possible. So, for several years, Luby commuted from Chicago to Bloomington to attend SPEA.
“I was still working in Chicago, but I’d leave on a Sunday and come back home on Wednesday night,” he recalls. “It was tough, but it’s all about compartmentalizing. When I was down at SPEA I was just doing graduate work. Then I’d circle back and make sure I was tending to my business and my family. I was willing to do it because the program was such a draw. I knew I was getting the training to be a top-quality researcher.”
At SPEA, Luby focused on debt management within state and municipal governments, specifically examining the sale of bonds to generate capital. He used this information, however, to ask larger questions about the behavior of public managers and whether standard economic models were sufficient to describe the public sector.
“The traditional economic theories that try to explain public management behavior didn’t resonate with my professional experience,” he explains. “People have been using models that assume that public managers and elected officials make decisions after their own financial self-interest, but I haven’t found that to be true. In my research, I found public managers to be much more focused on maximizing long-term resources for the common good.”
Luby’s out-of-the-box thinking earned him lecturer positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago while he was still completing his PhD. Now that he has finished, he’s headed to the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University as an assistant professor.
It’s been an exhausting journey, but Luby has no regrets. “I wouldn’t do anything differently,” he says. “I can’t speak highly enough of SPEA. It was an intense few years balancing everything, but it was the right choice, definitely.”