About Us
Jerome "Jerry" Smith
Mr. Smith has held senior management positions while engaging in all aspects of airport financial forecasting, budgeting, analysis, management and economic analysis.
His experience in airport finance includes tenures in the public as well as the private sectors, performing at both the technical and administrative level. In the public sector, his career evolved from responsibility for airfield operations budgeting at O’Hare International Airport to administrative and financial responsibility for the Chicago Airport System.
In the private sector, his focus has been on areas of financial modeling and forecasting of airport operations and assessment of the financial feasibility of airport projects. He has extensive experience in the area of public financing of airport projects. Throughout the 90’s he served on the financing teams of major airport and infrastructure projects as co-airport consultant and has written economic demographic assessments to support revenue bond financings for Chicago O'Hare and Chicago Midway International Airports and Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.
Recently his focus has been on the assessment of the regional economic impact of airports and airport related infrastructure improvements, with studies at Chicago O'Hare and Midway International Airports, the collective Chicago Airport System, Xi'an Xianyang International Airport in China's Shaanxi Province, the Chicago/Gary Regional Airport and Mineta San Jose International Airport.
He holds a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago in Urban Economics and a Bachelor’s degree in Financial Management from Purdue University in West Lafayette Indiana. He also completed a year at of graduate studies in Financial Decision Analysis at the University of London as a Rotary Foundation Fellow.
Starting as an airfield operations budget analyst, I have grown to become an airport economists while working with some of the most prestigious and highly regarded firms in airport planning, real estate management, investment banking and economic modeling