Donald J. Boyd, 2024 Steven D. Gold Award Recipient

The Steven D. Gold Award was created in 1997 in memory of Steve Gold, who had an exemplary career as an analyst, researcher, and teacher, specializing in issues related to state and local public finance and intergovernmental relations. The award is given annually by the National Tax Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures — all organizations in which he was an active member — with the winner selected by one of the three organizations each year on a rotating basis.

This year’s recipient of the Steve D. Gold award, Donald J. Boyd, has had a distinguished career in state and local government public finance, holding a wide variety of positions in both government and research organizations. Like Steve, he has done both scholarly academic work, advised students and worked closely with government officials, helping to examine and improve state and local public finance.

Early in his career, he analyzed fiscal, budget, and tax issues for both the legislative and executive branches of New York State. This service included leadership posts such as Director of Tax Studies for the State Assembly Ways and Means Committee and Director of Tax Policy and Revenue Analysis for the New York State Division of the Budget. He has also served on numerous boards, advisory committees, and task forces including the Educational Finance Advisory Group to the New York State Department of Education and as Chair of the Advisory Board to the New York City Independent Budget Office. Perhaps most prominently, Don served as Executive Director of the State Budget Crisis Task Force where he worked with former New York lieutenant governor Richard Ravitch and former Federal Reserve Board chair Paul Volcker to examine and publicize long-run fiscal threats to state government budgets. 

Don has also held multiple leadership roles in policy research organizations including Co-Director of the State and Local Government Finance Project at the University of Albany’s Center for Policy Research and Director of the Fiscal Studies Program at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government – the public policy research arm of the State University of New York. A role similar to that held by Steve Gold who also spent much of his career at the State University of New York at Albany. 

Don has been a prolific researcher with an extraordinary breadth of interests within state and local public finance. He has written on numerous topics including public pension obligations, governmental accounting standards, taxation, fiscal federalism, state budgeting, long-term budget challenges, the interaction of the macro economy and state budgets, revenue forecasting, social insurance programs, K-12 education finance, and evaluating the role of teacher effectiveness and teacher labor markets on school and student performance. In terms of style, his research occupies a nearly unique space in its combination of significant technical sophistication mixed with a presentation style rendering it accessible to a wide audience, including policy makers; his work on state and local government pensions serves as a case in point. Don’s research is highly cited with well over 10,000 google scholar citations; his work on teacher effectiveness has been particularly well cited.

Beyond his obvious qualifications for this award, Don also exemplifies the characteristics that made Steve Gold such a wonderful role model – in terms of always being willing to answer questions from students, practitioners and other researchers and to work tirelessly to help make state and local governments operate better and help inform and create the next generation of researchers in this area. 

Donald Boyd’s work will be celebrated and he will accept the Steve Gold Award at the 117th Annual Conference of the National Tax Association in November.