Michael Faulkender is the Dean's Professor of Finance and former associate dean of master's programs and professor of finance at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.

[1] He is known for his research on executive compensation and the corporate tax practices of multinational firms.

On December 4, 2024, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump nominated Faulkender as deputy U.S. treasury secretary.

In Trump's first term, Faulkender served as the assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy.

[3] Faulkender was awarded the Barclays Global Investors' Michael J. Brennan Best Paper Award in the Review of Financial Studies in 2013, for "Investment and Capital Constraints: Repatriations Under the American Jobs Creation Act," co-authored with Mitchell Petersen.