Mr. Bernstein is a Chief Economist at RCF Economic and Financial Consulting, Inc. with over 35 years of experience in economics consulting and academia. In addition to his work at RCF, Mr. Bernstein is a member of the faculty of DePaul University Department of Economics where he teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in economics and finance. He is president of the Chicago Association for Business Economists. Previously he taught economics at Loyola University of Chicago. Mr. Bernstein has a B.A and M.B.A. degrees from the University of Chicago.
Mr. Bernstein has conducted several studies of the housing market, including work for the Center for Naval Analyses, and as developer of the Chicago Data Book, a compilation of statistical data on the Chicago economy. He directed a large scale survey of over 7,500 O’Hare Airport passengers for the Chicago Department of Aviation and authored analyses of Tax Increment Financing and a comparison of local tax burdens for the City of Chicago.
Mr. Bernstein is also a participant in the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s Survey of Professional Forecasters, presenting quarterly forecasts of macroeconomic variables. He also provides regular forecasts for Thompson-Reuters economic surveys and Zillow’s surveys of housing price expectations. He continues to produce regular reports analyzing key economic developments.
Mr. Bernstein has presented more than a dozen testimonies on behalf of the United States Postal Service in regulatory proceedings, postal rate cases, and labor arbitration hearings. His most recent labor arbitration testimony (September 2020) detailed the Postal Service’s financial outlook with special attention given to developments in the package deliver market, e-commerce trends, and activities by postal competitors UPS and FedEx as well as the likely impact of the expansion of Amazon’s delivery network. He has also co-authored several reports with the U.S. Office of the Inspector General.
