2005 Headlines
Professor O'Hara Presents Three Finance Lectures at OxfordEsteemed Professor Chosen to Lead Coveted "Clarendon Lectures in Finance" September 12, 2005, Ithaca, New York The Johnson School at Cornell University is pleased to announce that Professor Maureen O'Hara, the Robert W. Purcell Professor of Finance, presented the prestigious Clarendon Lectures at the fourth Oxford Finance Summer Symposium at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford. Professor O'Hara's series of three lectures were entitled "Microstructure in a Theory of Finance." The symposium, a ten-day event at Oxford, is a series of seminars and workshops attended by some of the world's leading scholars in Finance. O'Hara's first lecture examined how information risks in securities trading affect returns on assets. She described a measure of the proportion of information based trades (PINs) based on data on buy and sell trades of individual stocks. She used this measure in factor models of asset pricing to establish the extent to which the proportion of information based trades affects share price returns. She reported that the PINS were both statistically and economically significant and dominated all other variables in explaining returns. In her second lecture, O'Hara described how the proportion of information based trades affects the cost of capital of firms. In particular, the cost of capital is influenced by the proportion of public and private information, rising as the ratio of private to public information increases. The reason for this is that uninformed investors face greater risks in stocks that have a higher proportion of private information and require compensation in the form of higher returns. She showed that the PINs of companies are related to the characteristics of firms such as their size and age and argued that accounting information can therefore be used to predict the PINs of companies and their cost of capital. In the third lecture, O'Hara discussed the design of rules and procedures for trading assets (market microstructure) and their influence on the efficiency of markets. She considered three classes of rules - market rules, trading systems and trading procedures - and described how they affect such measures of market efficiency as errors in prices, bid-ask spreads and the profits of different participants in the market. One of the functions of market microstructure is to encourage participation by uninformed as well as informed investors. She showed how exchange rules can do this and result in different classes of investors and firms trading on different types of markets. At the Johnson School, Professor O'Hara's research focuses on issues in market microstructure, and she is the author of Market Microstructure Theory (Blackwell: 1995) as well as numerous journal articles. Her most recent research has focused on the role of underwriters in the aftermarket trading of IPOs, the impact of transparency on trading system performance, listing and delisting issues in securities markets, designing markets for developing markets, and the role of liquidity and information risk in asset pricing. In addition, Dr. O'Hara publishes widely on a broad range of topics including banking and financial intermediaries, law and finance, and experimental economics. Professor O'Hara recently concluded six years as the executive editor of the Review of Financial Studies. She has served as president of the Western Finance Association, and as president of the American Finance Association. Professor O'Hara is on the board of directors of Investment Technology Group, Inc. (ITG), an agency brokerage firm, where she serves as lead director and chair of the compensation committee. She has consulted for a number of companies and organizations, including Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston, the New York Stock Exchange, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, and the World Federation of Exchanges. Professor O'Hara joined the faculty at Cornell in 1979. She has held visiting faculty appointments at UCLA, the London Business School, the University of New South Wales, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Cambridge University. She earned her BS in economics from the University of Illinois and her MS in economics and PhD in finance from Northwestern University. Established in 1996, the Sa?d Business School is Europe's newest and fastest growing business school. An integral part of historic Oxford University the school embodies the academic rigour and forward thinking that has made Oxford a world leader in education. The school is dedicated to developing a new generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs, and conducting research not only into the nature of business, but the connections between business and the wider world. The Johnson School at Cornell University, founded in 1946, is Cornell's graduate school of management. The Johnson School combines leading edge intellectual capital with "real time, real world" business practice and is among the top business schools in the world. The school is distinguished by a diverse, multinational community working closely within a small, interactive and intensely collaborative environment. The Johnson School offers a wide variety of opportunities for experiential learning, such as immersion curricula and student-run venture capital and mutual funds. Programs include MBA and doctoral degrees, a twelve-month MBA option for students with advanced degrees in science or engineering, an executive MBA and a variety of customized executive education programs. The Johnson School is located at the center of Cornell University-the largest of the Ivy League schools and one of the world's top research institutions. For More Information |
