Faculty

Professor Simona Abis joined Columbia Business School in 2017. She holds a PhD from INSEAD. Before joining the PhD program Simona worked as a quantitative researcher for a systematic hedge fund. Her research interests span the fields of information economics, empirical and theoretical asset pricing, financial econometrics, microeconomics, Bayesian learning, machine learning, mutual funds and hedge funds. Overall Simona is interested in the impact of technology on financial markets.

Boaz Abramson is an assistant professor in the finance division at Columbia Business School. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University in 2022, and holds a MA and BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

Professor Arzac is an expert on corporate finance and valuation. He teaches the advanced corporate finance courses in the MBA and Executive MBA programs, directs the Merger, Buyouts and Corporate Restructuring program for executives, and co-directs the Mergers and Acquisitions program for executives at London Business School. He is the author of the book Valuation for Mergers, Buyouts and Restructuring and has published many articles in finance and economics journals.

Professor Tania Babina joined the Columbia Business School in 2016. She received a Ph.D. from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina. Her research is at the juncture of corporate finance, labor economics, and entrepreneurship. More broadly, she studies inter-relationship between human capital and firm investment, financing, and organizational choices. Her current research explores drivers of entrepreneurship and factors predicting entrepreneurial success. Long-term, she seeks to understand how human capital affects the nature of a firm and firm boundaries.

Professor Bekaert teaches courses on international finance, empirical asset pricing and investments. His research focus is international finance, with a particular interest in foreign exchange market efficiency, exchange rate determination and international and emerging equity markets. He is also interested in portfolio management.

Patrick Bolton is the David Zalaznick Professor of Business. He joined Columbia Business School in July 2005. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics in 1986 and holds a BA in economics from the University of Cambridge and a BA in political science from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. He began his career as an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley and then moved to Harvard University, joining their economics department from 1987-1989. He was Chargé de Recherche at the C.N.R.S.

Professor Olivier Darmouni is a financial economist whose research interests span corporate finance, banking and industrial organization. He applies a variety of empirical methods to understand how frictions, in particular asymmetric information, affect credit markets. Prior to joining Columbia, Olivier graduated from a PhD in Economics from Princeton University.

Michael Ewens is a David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School. His is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, Associate Editor at the Review of Financial Studies, Associate Editor at the Journal of Corporate Finance, and co-editor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy. He received a PhD in from the University of California, San Diego.

Xavier Giroud is the Roger F. Murray Associate Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

Lawrence R. Glosten is the S. Sloan Colt Professor of Banking and International Finance at Columbia Business School. He is also co-director (with Merritt Fox and Ed Greene) of the Program in the Law and Economics of Capital Markets at Columbia Law School and Columbia Business School and is an adjunct faculty member at the Law School. He has been at Columbia since 1989, before which he taught at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and has held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota.

Professor Donna M. Hitscherich currently serves as a senior lecturer of Finance, director of the Private Equity Program, and a Bernstein Faculty Leader at the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. Professor Hitscherich’s courses include Corporate Finance as well as the elective courses Business Law, Mergers and Acquisitions, and Advanced Corporate Finance. In 2002, she was nominated for the Dean’s Award for Innovation in the MBA Curriculum for her presentation of the Advanced Corporate Finance course.

Laurie Simon Hodrick is a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the A. Barton Hepburn Professor Emerita of Economics in the Faculty of Business at Columbia Business School. 

Professor Hodrick teaches both fundamental and advanced courses in international finance. His expertise is in the valuation of financial assets. His current research explores the empirical implications of theoretical pricing models that generate time-varying risk premiums in the markets for bonds, equities and foreign currencies. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Gur Huberman is the Robert G. Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance at Columbia Business School where he has taught since 1989. Prior to that, he taught at Tel Aviv University and at the University of Chicago. Between 1993 and 1995 he was Vice President at JP Morgan Investment Management responsible for research on quantitative equity trading. In that capacity, he also helped develop tax aware strategies for the private bank. He earned his Ph.D. (with distinction) in operations research from Yale in 1980 and his B.Sc. (cum laude) in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1975.

Wei Jiang is Arthur F. Burns Professor of Free and Competitive Enterprise in the Finance Division at Columbia Business School.  She is also a Scholar-in-Residence at Columbia Law School, a Senior Fellow at the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School, and a Research Associate of the NBER—Law and Economics.  Professor Jiang received her B.A. and M.A. in international economics from Fudan University (China), and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 2001 after which she joined Columbia Business School.

Professor Johannes’s research analyzes the empirical content of fixed-income and derivative securities pricing models. He is particularly interested in developing econometric methods to investigate models with jumps and stochastic volatility. Johannes teaches the elective Capital Markets and Investments.

Brian P. Lancaster is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Finance at the Columbia Business School.  Professor Lancaster teaches the following courses: Real Estate Finance, Real Estate Debt Markets, Residential Real Estate Finance:  Dirt, Debt and Derivatives, Capital Markets and Investments, Real Estate Entrepreneurship, and  Debt Markets in the MBA, EMBA, PhD and MS&E programs.

Angela Lee teaches venture capital, leadership, and strategy courses at CBS.  She brings 20 years of innovation, strategy, and entrepreneurship experience to the classroom.  She started her career in product management and then moved into strategy consulting at McKinsey.  Angela is passionate about entrepreneurship and has started several companies in the education sector.  She is a startup investor and the founder of 37 Angels, an investing network that has evaluated 15000 startups, invested in 80, and activates new investors through a startup investment boot camp.

Professor Jian Li joined Columbia Business School in 2021. She graduated with a PhD from the Joint Program of Financial Economics at the University of Chicago. Her research interest lies at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. She is particularly interested in how financial intermediaries affect the real economy and how different types of financial institutions can contribute to financial instability.

Professor Anton Lines currently conducts research in the areas of empirical asset pricing, asset management, information economics and market microstructure. His recent work examines fund manager skill, strategic trading, and the impact of institutional investor’s incentive contracts on the prices of the assets they hold. He earned a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a PhD from London Business School before joining Columbia Business School in 2017.

Yiming Ma is an assistant professor in the finance division at Columbia Business School. She received her Ph.D. in Finance from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2018 and holds a BA from Yale University. 

Harry Mamaysky is a Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Business School, where he serves as the Director of the Program for Financial Studies.  He is also on the Steering Committee of the Columbia-IBM Center for Blockchain and Technology. Harry teaches capital markets and asset pricing to MBA, Masters and PhD students, as well as Executive Education courses on the use of text data in finance, and on corporate bonds.  He has consulted for a quantitative investment firm and for a nationally recognized statistical rating organization.

Christopher Mayer is the Paul Milstein Professor of Real Estate at Columbia Business School. His research explores a variety of topics in real estate and financial markets, including housing cycles, mortgage markets, debt securitization, and commercial real estate valuation. Dr. Mayer is also CEO of Longbridge Financial, an innovative reverse mortgage company focused on delivering responsible home equity products to older Americans to help finance retirement.

Michaela Pagel is the Roderick H. Cushman Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. She received her Ph.D. from the Economics Department at UC Berkeley and works on topics in behavioral economics, household finance, and macroeconomics. Her dissertation focused on the consumption and investment implications of non-standard preferences. More specifically, she theoretically studied how decision-making is affected by people's beliefs about their consumption.

Giorgia Piacentino is an associate professor in the Finance Division at Columbia Business School. She received her PhD from the London School of Economics in 2013 and holds an MSc from the Toulouse School of Economics. Before joining Columbia, she was an assistant professor at Washington University in St Louis.

Tomasz Piskorski is the Edward S. Gordon Professor of Real Estate in the Finance Division at Columbia Business School. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and serves on the Academic Research Council of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Professor Piskorski earned a M.S. in Mathematics from New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and a Ph.D. in Economics from New York University Stern School of Business.

Lynne B. Sagalyn is the Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor Emerita of Real Estate at Columbia Business School, where she was formerly the director of the MBA Real Estate Program and the founding director of the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate.

Professor Santos' research focuses on two distinct areas. A first interest is the field of asset pricing with a particular emphasis on theoretical and empirical models that can account for the predictability of returns, both in the time series and the cross section. A second interest of Professor Santos is applied economic theory, specifically, the economics of financial innovations as well as theory of organizations. He teaches options markets.

Suresh Sundaresan is the Chase Manhattan Bank Foundation Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia University. He has published in the areas of Treasury auctions, bidding, default risk, habit formation, term structure of interest rates, asset pricing, investment theory, pension asset allocation, swaps, options, forwards, futures, fixed-income securities markets and risk management.

Professor Tetlock's research interests include behavioral finance, asset pricing, and prediction markets. One area of his research examines how firms' stock market prices respond to the content of news stories. His 2007 Journal of Finance study on the impact of negative words, such as "flaw" and "ruin", won the Smith-Breeden Prize for the best article in asset pricing. His research has been featured in popular press outlets such as Business Week, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh is the Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate and Professor of Finance at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, which he joined in July 2018.

Laura Veldkamp is a Professor of Finance at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and is a former editor of the Journal of Economic Theory. Professor Veldkamp earned a B.A in applied mathematics and economics from Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. in economic analysis and policy from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Columbia, she taught at NYU for 15 years.

Neng Wang is Chong Khoon Lin Professor of Real Estate and Finance at Columbia Business School. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Senior Research Fellow at Asian Bureau of Financial and Economics Research (ABFER), and an Academic Member of the Luohan Academy. He has widely published in leading economics, finance, and business journals.

Daniel Wolfenzon is the Stefan H. Robock Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School. He received a Masters and a PhD in economics from Harvard University and holds a BS in economics and a BS in mechanical engineering from MIT. Professor Wolfenzon previously taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago and NYU. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests are in corporate finance and organizational economics.

Professor Kairong Xiao is an associate professor of finance at Columbia Business School. His research interests span financial intermediation, industrial organization, and political economy. His research papers have been published in top finance and economics journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and Management Science.

Mark A. Zurack teaches Capital Markets and Investments, Equity Derivatives and Equity Markets and Products at Columbia Business School. Mark is currently on the Board of Directors of the Binghamton University Foundation and also serves on the Boards of the Alzheimer's Association, Teach For America, Upper West Success Academy, ETC, Southampton Bath and Tennis and the Columbia Business School Social Enterprise Program. Prior to coming to Columbia, Professor Zurack worked at Goldman Sachs for 18 years. He joined GS in 1983 and started the equity derivatives research group.