Advisory Board Members
Robert W. Holthausen (Chair)
Robert W. Holthausen, PhD. The Nomura Securities Co. Professor, Full Professor in Wharton Accounting, Professor of Finance.
- Research interests include accounting choice and organizational structure, effects of information on prices and volume, effects of organizational structure on financial performance, management compensation issues, valuation.
- Research has appeared in such journals as the Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Accounting Review, the Journal of Accounting Research, the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Financial Economics.
- Authored Corporate Valuation: Theory, Evidence and Practice in 2014.
- Teaches Valuation of Companies, and Research in Accounting.
- Education: St. Lawrence University, BA; University of Rochester, Graduate School of Management, PhD in Business Administration.
Itamar Drechsler
Itamar Drechsler, PhD. Professor of Finance, Co-Director, Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research.
- Research interests include asset pricing, financial intermediation, and monetary policy.
- Recent research on the rise and fall of the Great Inflation used novel historical data from call reports filed with the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and the Office of Thrift Supervision.
- Recent paper on Liquidity and Volatility used CRSP data for constructing reversal portfolios.
- Teaches Corporate Finance, Topics in Macro Finance.
- Education: University of Pennsylvania, BSEcon Finance, BSE Computer Science and Mathematics; University of Pennsylvania, MA in Finance, MA in Mathematics, and PhD in Finance.
Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts, PhD. William H. Lawrence Professor, Professor of Finance, Faculty Fellow - Analytics at Wharton.
- Research interests include applied econometrics, corporate investment, capital structure, and payout policy, empirical asset pricing, security design and contract renegotiation.
- Recent research on performance of collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) used CLO data from Intex Solutions, a leading provider of information on structured finance products.
- Teaches courses in Corporate Finance, Data Science for Finance, Empirical Methods in Corporate Finance.
- Education: University of California, San Diego, BA in Economics; University of California, Berkeley, MA in Statistics; University of California, Berkeley, PhD in Economics.
Nikolai Roussanov
Nikolai Roussanov, PhD. Moise Y. Safra Professor, Professor of Finance, Academic Advisor - MBA major in Quantitative Finance, Academic Director - "Wharton on the Markets" series.
- Research interests include asset pricing, econometrics, household finance, macroeconomics.
- Recent research includes using stock returns on major news announcement days to link aggregate stock price fluctuations to shale technology innovations.
- Recent research also includes using machine learning to efficiently combine a broad set of signals and produce a testing set of portfolios: “None of the well-known factor models can explain the returns of the testing set, and we observe monotonically increasing realized risk-adjusted excess returns.“
- Teaches courses in Consumer Finance Decision Making, Fixed Income Securities, Behavioral Finance, Introduction to Empirical Methods in Finance.
- Education: Moscow State University - work toward degree in mathematics; Harvard University, AB in Mathematics; The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, PhD in Finance.
Hummy Song
Hummy Song, PhD. Assistant Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions.
- Research on identifying ways to improve the performance of service systems, with a particular emphasis on health care delivery systems.
- In her research, Song uses large datasets derived from electronic health record systems, administrative databases, and surveys of the health care workforce.
- Recent research has been about essential workers and Covid.
- Teaches Operations, Information and Decisions courses. [These courses cover common quantitative modeling problems that arise frequently in business setting--how they can be formally modeled and solved with a combination of business insight and computer-based tools].
- Education: Harvard College, AB; Harvard Kennedy School of Government, MPP; Harvard University, PhD in Health Policy Management.
Daniel J. Taylor
Daniel J. Taylor, PhD. Associate Professor of Accounting, Director of the Wharton Forensic Analytics Lab.
- Research interests include opportunistic/fraudulent reporting, insider trading, regulation.
- Recent research includes “Voluntary disclosure when private information and disclosure costs are jointly determined.”
- He was also recently involved with the Wharton Forensic Analytics lab study that identified three “red flags” associated with opportunistic use of 10b5-1 plans (prompted in part by insider trading windows that have opened up with speculation around Covid vaccine development).
- Teaches courses in Introduction to Financial Accounting, Predictive Analytics with Financial Disclosures, Empirical Design in Accounting Research.
- Education: University of Delaware, BS in Economics; Duke University, MA in Economics; Stanford University, PhD in Business.
Jules van Binsbergen
Jules van Binsbergen, PhD. The Nippon Life Professor in Finance, Professor of Finance.
- Conducts both theoretical and empirical research in finance, focusing on asset pricing.
- Recently researched the influence of financial market anomalies on real economic activity, measuring the skill of mutual fund managers and the term structure of cash flow growth and stock return predictability.
- One of his recent working papers includes a section on anomalies in CRSP mutual fund data and compares CRSP data with Morningstar to get to the bottom of these discrepancies.
- Teaches Corporate Finance, Investment Management, Asset Pricing.
- Education: Royal Conservatory, The Hague, the Netherlands, Jazz Piano; Tilburg University, the Netherlands, MA in Financial Econometrics; Yale University, Department of Economics, Visiting Graduate Student; Duke University, Fuqua School of Business, PhD in Finance.
Christina Zhu
Christina Zhu, PhD. Harold C. Stott Assistant Professor, Assistant Professor of Accounting.
- Recent research examines the effects of alternative data availability: stock price informativeness and its disciplining effect on managers’ actions.
- Studies the different elements of the feedback loop between investors’ information acquisition costs, stock price efficiency, and managers’ incentives and actions.
- Zhu's research includes using trade-level data to examine the role of actively managed funds (AMFs) in earnings news dissemination.
- Teaches Accounting and Financial Reporting, and Research in Accounting.
- Education: Stanford University, B.A. in Economics and B.S. in Mathematics; Stanford University, Ph.D. in Business Administration (Accounting).