UGA Fall Finance Conference

Daniel Bergstresser is Associate Professor at the Brandeis International Business School and serves as Chair of the Undergraduate Business Program at Brandeis. His research focuses on municipal finance, and the impact of taxation, regulation and market structure on financial markets. His research has been published in the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Municipal Finance Journal and the Journal of Public Economics, and has been widely cited in both the academic and business press. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics at MIT and an A.B. at Stanford. From 2006-2007, he worked for Barclays Global Investors, serving in London as Head of European Credit Research. Prior to graduate school, he worked for the Federal Reserve Board in Washington D.C.

Audra Boone is a Professor of Finance and holder of the C.R. Williams Professorship in Financial Services in the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University. She is also a research member at the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). Prior to these positions, she was a senior financial economist at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) working in the financial intermediaries group of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis. She also previously served as a visiting scholar at the SEC to work on litigation and policy issues related to corporate finance and investments.

Professor Boone was an Associate Professor and the Gina and William H. Flores ’76 Endowed Professorship in Finance in the Department of Finance of the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University from 2011 to 2015. During this time, she also was a visiting faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin for the 2014-2015 academic year. She was previously on the faculty at the University of Kansas and the College of William & Mary. She received her B.S. from the University of Kansas and earned her Ph.D. in finance from Pennsylvania State University. She is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Corporate Finance and has served as a referee for several top finance and accounting journals.

Tony Cookson is a Professor of Finance and faculty director for the MS in Finance program at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado – Boulder.

Tony is a Montana native. After earning his bachelor’s degree in economics and master’s degrees in Statistics and Applied Economics from Montana State University, he received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Chicago. He has been on faculty at University of Colorado since 2013.

His research is empirical and covers a wide range of topics in finance and economics. His research makes use of unique data sets and empirical settings to study how households and corporations make financial decisions. Through his research, Dr. Cookson has become an expert on how investors use social media, the casino industry, the political economy of Native American reservations, and the consequences of the fracking revolution for households. His research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, and Management Science. He is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Financial Economics and Financial Management.

Since 2022, he is a director of the Financial Research Association, which organizes a prominent academic finance research conference in Las Vegas annually.

Dr. Sheridan Titman holds the Walter W. McAllister Centennial Chair in Financial Services in the Department of Finance at the McCombs School of Business. Dr. Titman’s research focuses on the banking, capital markets, energy and investment banking industries. In addition to UT Austin, Dr. Titman has taught at the University of California Los Angeles, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and Boston College.

Dr. Titman’s academic publications include both theoretical and empirical articles on asset pricing, corporate finance and real estate and energy finance. Sheridan won the Smith-Breeden Prize for the best finance research paper published in the Journal of Finance, the GSAM best paper award for the Review of Finance and was a recipient of the Batterymarch Fellowship. Sheridan served on the editorial boards of leading academic journals, including the Journal of Finance and the Review of Financial Studies. He is the current President of the American Finance Association and was formerly the President and Director of the Western Finance Association and a former Director of the Asia Pacific Finance Association. He has also co-authored three finance textbooks, “Financial Markets and Corporate Strategy,” “Valuation: The Art and Science of Corporate Investment Decisions,” and “Financial Management: Principles and Applications.”