Finance Research

The finance faculty is an active research group dedicated to advancing the understanding of financial economics. Many of the faculty have earned international reputations for contributions to their fields. They are officers of prestigious professional organizations, are editors of and serve on editorial boards of leading academic journals, and consult and teach for public and private sector organizations. They are frequent contributors to the leading scholarly journals in finance and economics.

The combined intellectual capital of the Smith School’s 150 full-time and 50 part-time faculty are geared to the forces that are transforming the global economy and business and dedicated to helping our students understand and adapt to change. The Smith School is consistently ranked in the top 15 in the world for faculty research by Businessweek and Financial Times.

Finance Seminar Speakers: Spring 2025

DATESPEAKERLOCATION
February 28 
10:30 a.m. – Noon
Aaron Pancost 
University of Texas, Austin
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VMH 1330
March 7 
10:30 a.m. – Noon
Adi Sunderam 
Harvard University
VMH 1333
March 14 
10:30 a.m. – Noon
Deniz Aydin 
Washington University in St Louis
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VMH 1333
April 4 
10:30 a.m. – Noon
Taisiya Sikorskaya 
University of Chicago
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VMH 1333
April 7 
1:00 pm – 2:30 pm
Kilian Huber 
University of Chicago
VMH 2333 ABC
April 11 
10:30 a.m. – Noon
Torben Andersen 
Northwestern University
VMH 1333
April 25 
10:30 a.m. - Noon
Bo Bian 
University of British Columbia
VMH 1333
May 2 
10:30 a.m. – Noon
Julia Fonseca 
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
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VMH 1333
May 9 
10:30 a.m. – Noon
Carola Frydman 
Northwestern University
VMH 1333

Finance Seminar Speakers: Fall 2024

DATESPEAKER
September 6Toni Whited
University of Michigan
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September 13Sharjil Haque
Federal Reserve
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September 20Deeksha Gupta
Johns Hopkins University
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September 27John Shim
University of Notre Dame
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October 4Paymon Khorrami
Duke University
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October 15Charles Nathanson
Northwestern University
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October 18Daniel Garrett
University of Pennsylvania
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October 25Valentin Haddad
UCLA
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November 8Greg Buchak
Stanford University
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November 22Amiyatosh Purnanandam
University of Michigan
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December 6Jaroslav Borovička
New York University
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December 10Scott Baker
Northwestern University
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Finance Seminar Speakers: Spring 2024

DateSpeaker
March 15Christian Opp
University of Rochester
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April 19Janet Gao
Georgetown University
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April 24David Autor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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April 26Kerry Back
Rice University
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May 3Olivia Kim
Harvard Business School
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May 17Philip Dybvig
Washington University in Saint Louis
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Finance Seminar Speakers: Fall 2023

DateSpeaker
September 7Stavros Panageas
UCLA
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September 15Winston Dou
University of Pennsylvania
September 29Dmitiry Muravyev
Michigan State University
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October 6Luigi Zingales
University of Chicago
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October 18Ufuk Akcigit
University of Chicago
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November 17Sheridan Titman
University of Texas, Austin
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December 8Lubos Pastor
University of Chicago
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December 15Jason Sockin
Cornell University
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Banking Seminar

October 24, 2024

Event highlights

The Journal of Financial Services Research and the Center for Financial Policy hosted the inaugural Banking Seminar Series at the Ronald Reagan Building, Smith School Suite. The event featured Raghuram G. Rajan, Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who led the first seminar in the series.

Financial Databases & Software

The Robert H. Smith School of Business provides its faculty and students easy access to the world’s leading online real-time financial data and software. In partnership with the University of Maryland McKeldin Library, the Robert H. Smith School of Business provides its faculty and students with a world-class set of research financial and other business databases, and the software to access them. Thomson Reuters Reuters 3000 Xtra – 62 concurrent accesses Reuters 3000 Xtra is a high-speed, integrated information and transaction service. It gives users a commanding view of the global real-time financial arena and provides a combination of news, information and insight as well as access to the global Reuters trading community. Its integrated price discovery and trading capabilities across all asset classes mean that decisions can be made and executed from a single desktop. Reuters 3000 Xtra reflects Reuters vast experience in global financial markets; functionality is continually upgraded and content enriched. Datastream Advance Thomson Datastream Advance offers you access to the world's largest and most respected financial statistical database. It contains more than two million financial instruments, securities, and indicators for over 175 countries in 60 markets. With up to 50 years of history and over 8,000 different fields, it provides access to over one hundred million time series. Thomson Datastream Advance combines easy-to-use, pre-formatted charts and tabular reports with truly flexible charting to help reveal new insights and relationships. Bloomberg Bloomberg Professional – 6 full function terminals The BLOOMBERG PROFESSIONAL® service seamlessly integrates real-time and historical information on about 5 million bonds, equities, commodities, currencies and funds. The electronic library also comprises data on almost every publicly traded company and biographies of more than 1 million people. And because everything is provided in single source, information can be accessed, analyzed or archived with just a few keystrokes or clicks. Historical Databases and Retrieval Software Full access is available to members of the University of Maryland community and on the Maryland campus. WRDS We subscribe to the Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS), a web based data service that provides instant access to several research quality financial databases.

Research Articles

May 25, 2022
Summer Reading List 2022
Check out the 19th annual Summer Reading List for Business Leaders, with recommendations from faculty members at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. This year’s list includes new and older books on the Fed, problem-solving, entrepreneurism, memory, vaccines, and human…
Read the article : Summer Reading List 2022
April 21, 2022
The Secret Safety Net for Money Market Funds
What’s the difference between prime institutional money market funds sponsored by bank holding companies (BHCs) and those funds that aren’t? Money market funds backed by these holding companies have an inherent safety net, according to research from Maryland Smith.
Read the article : The Secret Safety Net for Money Market Funds
March 3, 2022
What Losing SWIFT Network Access Means for Russian Banks
With Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine intensifying, the United States and several key allies moved to cut Russia off from much of the global financial system – barring select Russian banks from participating the SWIFT global finance network.
Read the article : What Losing SWIFT Network Access Means for Russian Banks
January 20, 2022
Microsoft Aims to Level up With Activision-blizzard. It’s Not That Easy.
Its proposed $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard would make Microsoft the world’s third-largest publisher of video games and, more significantly, would solidify its position in the development of the "metaverse” – widely considered the next evolution of the internet by which users in the…
Read the article : Microsoft Aims to Level up With Activision-blizzard. It’s Not That Easy.
December 14, 2021
16 Stocks to Watch in 2022

Six months ago, Maryland Smith’s David Kass updated his semi-annual “stocks to watch” list, expanding the lineup of watch-worthy shares to 21.

Read the article : 16 Stocks to Watch in 2022
November 29, 2021
How a New Life Cycle Variable Reveals the Big Picture
Analysis of product life cycles has been underutilized by the likes of research economists and financial analysts in examining firm investment policies.
Read the article : How a New Life Cycle Variable Reveals the Big Picture
November 17, 2021
Sub-Saharan Africa’s Debt Problem, the Pandemic, And What Must Happen Next
Maryland Smith’s Lemma Senbet, along with Brookings co-authors, explores how the pandemic and the swift and preemptive lockdowns implemented around the world in March of 2020, “left significant scars on the fiscal position of sub-Saharan Africa and the market condition it faces.”
Read the article : Sub-Saharan Africa’s Debt Problem, the Pandemic, And What Must Happen Next
November 10, 2021
How the Pandemic Shaped Economics

Traditional data sources couldn’t capture the whole economic picture during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading some to look to less-analyzed data sources – OpenTable reservations, TSA screenings, weekly credit-card transactions.

Read the article : How the Pandemic Shaped Economics
October 27, 2021
What to Make of WeWork’s Second Market Entry Attempt
When WeWork saw its IPO bid come to an abrupt halt in 2019, the company was forced to take a hard look in the mirror. Now it’s made a second attempt to go public – this time via a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
Read the article : What to Make of WeWork’s Second Market Entry Attempt
October 21, 2021
The Way Forward

From the earliest weeks of the pandemic, Maryland Smith’s Nicole Coomber was noticing a worrying trend.

Read the article : The Way Forward