Smith’s Kyle Named Fellow of American Finance Association

Albert “Pete” Kyle, an expert in market microstructure at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, has been named a Fellow of the American Finance Association for his distinguished and sustained contributions to the field of finance.

The honor places Kyle, the Charles E. Smith Chair Professor of Finance, among “a very small group of the most eminent finance researchers in our profession,” according to the association, which selects just one fellow each year.

Kyle’s research has spanned informed speculative trading, market manipulation, price volatility, the information content of market prices, market liquidity, contagion and concepts from industrial organization to value companies.   

“Professor Kyle is among the financial world’s foremost theorists,” said Smith School Dean Alex Triantis. “His ‘Kyle Model’ is a foundation for understanding price formation in today’s markets, and his research has affected derivatives and bond markets and international trading processes.”

Kyle’s working paper, "Large Bets and Stock Market Crashes,” has yielded a formula (market microstructure invariance) to predict the magnitude of price declines based on the size of bets relative to other market conditions. The framework sheds light on past crashes, and could help prevent future crashes.

Joining the Smith finance faculty in 2006, Kyle’s teaching has covered market microstructure, institutional asset management, venture capital and private equity, corporate finance, option pricing and asset pricing.   

Kyle serves on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's Economic Advisory Committee. He was a NASDAQ economic advisory board member from 2004-2007 and recently served on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's Technology Advisory Committee.

Kyle studied philosophy and economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar before completing his PhD in economics at the University of Chicago in 1981. He also has consulted and served as an expert witness for numerous companies, law firms and government agencies.