2008 Headlines
Saar and Thomas Named Whitcomb Faculty Fellows
Award supports faculty research
September 17, 2008 | Ithaca, NY | The Johnson School at Cornell University announces Associate Professor Gideon Saar and Assistant Professor Manoj Thomas have been awarded Clifford H. Whitcomb Faculty Fellowships for a one-year term beginning on November 1, 2008. The fellowship was established by Clifford Whitcomb ('43, MBA '48), an active alumnus and longtime supporter of the Johnson School and Cornell University. The income from the endowment of the fellowships is used to support the work of the recipients.
Gideon Saar is an associate professor of finance, whose research interests are in market microstructure, behavioral finance, stock market return predictability, and institutional investors. His current research focuses on using individual investor trading to predict returns, examining the effects of taxation on the behavior of traders, analyzing the listing choice of firms, and relating systematic liquidity to the risk premium of assets. He has published in the leading finance journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. At the request of the New York Stock Exchange, Saar spent the 2001-2002 academic year as the NYSE's visiting research economist.
Saar was previously on the faculty of the Stern School of Business at New York University. He holds a doctorate in finance from the Johnson School, '96, as well as a master's degree in economics from Cornell, '96, and an undergraduate degree in finance from the City University of New York
Manoj K. Thomas is an assistant professor of marketing. His research focuses on psychological processes that underlie consumer behavior. His current research projects can be grouped under two streams: the psychology of value assessment and the role of processing fluency in judgments. Under the first stream of research, he examines how consumers perceive and judge price information; decide how much to pay for a product; and how they use price and other attribute information to judge the quality of new products. In the other stream of research, he investigates how feelings caused by fluency of cognitive processing, ease of retrieving information from memory, and perceptual uncertainty affect consumers' judgments and behavior. His research has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research.
Thomas earned his PhD from New York University in 2006. While there, he received the Stern Award for PhD Teaching Excellence in 2005 and in 2006. At the Johnson School, he leads the Strategic Brand immersion program, among other teaching responsibilities.
Past recipients of Whitcomb Faculty Fellowships include: Professors Gavirneni, Spataro Hass, Chintagunta, Thomas, Stayman, McClain, Nelson, Swaminathan, Waldman, Haveman, Kadiyali, Frank, O'Connor, Michaely, Tasker, Mannix, Peterson, O'Hara, Bhojraj, Adair, Bloomfield, Gupta, Johnson, Bailey, Grinstein, Rao, Zhang, Huang, and Botti.
