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Maureen O'Hara

Maureen O'Hara

  • Professor
  • Robert W. Purcell Professor of Management

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Faculty Area

Interdisciplinary Theme

  • FinTech at Cornell

Faculty Expertise

  • Finance
  • Ethics

Contact

Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management

607.255.3645

mo19@cornell.edu

Cornell Directory Entry

Website

Biography

Maureen O'Hara is the Robert W. Purcell Professor of Finance at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, and she also holds a professorship at the University of Technology Sydney. O'Hara holds degrees from the University of Illinois (BS in economics) and Northwestern University (MS in economics and PhD in finance), as well as honorary doctorates from Facultés Universitaires Catholiques à Mons (FUCAM), Belgium, Universität Bern, Switzerland, and University College Dublin.

O'Hara's research focuses on issues in market microstructure, and she is the author of the classic book, Market Microstructure Theory (Blackwell; 1995). Recent research looks at how ETFs affect market stability, liquidity issues in corporate bond markets, and transaction costs in bitcoin. O'Hara also publishes widely on a broad range of topics, including banking and financial intermediaries, law and finance, experimental economics, and finance and ethics. Her book Something for Nothing: Arbitrage and Ethics on Wall Street was published by Norton in 2016.

O'Hara has served as president of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Financial Management Association, the Society for Financial Studies and the International Atlantic Economic Society. She was the executive editor of the Review of Financial Studies, and co-editor of the Review of Asset Pricing Studies. O'Hara serves on the Board of Trustees of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA). She spent more than a decade on the board of directors of Investment Technology Group, Inc. (ITG), a global agency brokerage firm, most recently serving as chairman of the board. She also served on the board of directors of NewStar Financial, a commercial finance company now owned by First Eagle.

She is currently an advisor to Symbiont IO, a fintech company focused on distributed ledger technology. She was a member of the CFTC-SEC Emerging Regulatory Issues Task Force (the "flash crash" committee), the global advisory board of the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI), and the advisory board of the Office of Financial Research, US Treasury. Most recently she served on the SEC Equity Market Structure Advisory Board. She has consulted for a number of companies and organizations, including Facebook, Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, the New York Stock Exchange, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, and the World Federation of Exchanges.

Selected Publications

Recent Courses

  • NBAT 5900 - Advanced Topics in Finance
  • NBA 5430/LAW 6430 - Financial Markets and Institutions
  • NRE 5020 - PhD Seminar - Market Microstructure

Academic Degrees

  • PhD Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, 1979
  • MA Northwestern University, 1976
  • BS University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1975