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.

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 Time Series Econometric and (Global) Asset Management.  With Robert Hodrick, he is the author of a textbook on International Financial Management.

Geert Bekaert has published over 70 articles in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Financial Studies and other academic journals. He is managing editor for the Journal of Banking and Finance.

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 monetary economics. He applies a variety of empirical methods to understand how frictions affect credit markets, monetary transmission, and the real economy. Prior to joining Columbia, Olivier graduated with 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.

Michael Johannes is the Anne Kaplan Professor of Finance at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He has been at Columbia since receiving his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Chicago in 2000. He has held visiting appointments at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He has also taught a course at Princeton University on derivatives, housing and mortgage-backed securities.

Charles M. Jones is the Robert W. Lear Professor of Finance and Economics and the Senior Vice Dean at Columbia Business School, where he has been on the faculty since 1997.  Professor Jones studies the structure of securities markets, liquidity, and trading costs, and he is particularly noted for his research on short sales, algorithmic and high-frequency trading, and the variation in liquidity over time.  His published articles have won a number of best paper awards and appear in outlets ranging from the Journal of Finance to Barron’s.

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 20000 startups, invested in 100, and activates new investors through a startup investment boot camp.  She is also a venture

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.

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, and also teaches at Cornell University as an Adjunct Professor. 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.

Mr. Ajdler is a Managing Director of Crescendo Partners, a value-oriented activist investment firm based in New York. He is also a director and the secretary of Rhapsody Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that went public in October 2006. In addition, he is a director of The Topps Company, a Nasdaq-listed marketer of entertainment products, and Hill International, a Nasdaq-listed construction management firm. Hill International recently went public by merging with Arpeggio Acquisition Corporation, a SPAC of which Mr. Ajdler was the CFO and a director.

Patricia Angus, JD, MIA, TEP, is Founder and CEO of Angus Advisory Group LLC, an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, and Managing Director, Global Family Enterprise Program.  A recognized thought leader in multi-generational family governance and wealth, she has advised families with businesses, trusts, and charitable foundations for more than 30 years. 

Ellen Carr has over two decades of experience as a high yield bond portfolio manager, most recently at Barksdale Investment Management (BIM), a majority-women-owned, institutional investment management firm based in Nashville, TN. She specializes in the construction and management of high yield and core plus bond portfolios. Prior to joining BIM, she served as senior vice president and a high yield portfolio manager for institutional separate accounts and mutual funds for The Capital Group Companies/American Funds in Los Angeles, CA.

Paul Clifford has over 20 years of origination, structuring and execution experience in the Project Finance sector. He arrange and advised on financings for infrastructure projects in the US and international markets at Standard Chartered Bank and other global    banks, where he was responsible for negotiating and executing multi-billion dollar deals across Oil & Gas, Power & Energy, Renewables, Infrastructure and Mining & Metals industry sectors. His experience covers Middle East, South Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Mark Cooper is a Portfolio Manager and analyst at First Eagle Investment Management.  He is a co-portfolio manager on the International Small Cap Value strategy.   Mark also is a global small cap generalist and covers oil field services, surface transportation and logistics across all capitalizations. 

Jay Dahya's primary areas of expertise are corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, corporate valuation, and international financial markets. He has taught finance at the undergraduate, MBA, EMBA, and PhD level, and is the recipient of several teaching awards for his efforts in the classroom. His research has been published in leading finance journals including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, among others.

Ivo de Wit is an Adjunct Professor and Senior Fellow at Columbia Business School.  Over the last 5 years he has been co-teaching an MBA course titled “Real Estate as an Asset and a Business” and has published papers in academic journals on performance drivers of real estate returns, international diversification and risk premiums of global real estate. His latest work is on the impact of international capital flows and investor sentiment on pricing of commercial real estate.

CAMILLE J. DOUGLAS has been a senior executive in the real estate industry for over 30 years with a breadth of experience in real estate finance, investment, and development. Her career has notably included pioneering work on commercial mortgage back securities, cross border equity investment, large scale project development and corporate recapitalizations.

Dalibor Eterovic is Managing Director and Economist of The Rohatyn Group (TRG), an asset manager focusing on emerging markets. His driving interest are financial systems in the developing world. In the private sector he has served as Chief Economist and Head of Strategy at Grupo Security, a leading Latin American multi-platform commercial and investment bank, as Manager of Economics and Fixed Income at Larrain Vial Investment Bank and as an economist at Merrill Lynch in London, focusing on emerging Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Avi Friedman, spent the majority of his career at Davidson Kempner Capital Management LP (currently ~$38 billion AUM).  He joined DK in 2001 and was promoted to Managing Member of the firm in 2006. During his tenure, Mr. Friedman co-managed all the credit portfolios of the firm including distressed investments, high yield, convertible arbitrage, real estate and structured products.  Prior to Davidson Kempner, Mr. Friedman worked at Nomura Securities and PriceWaterhouse Coopers all in roles related to distressed investments.

Michael Gatto was one of the first employees at Silver Point Capital, a credit-focused hedge fund. After joining the Firm in April 2002, he became the first non-founding partner in January 2003. He has helped grow the business from $120MM of assets under management in 2002 to approximately $13.5 billion currently. 

Today, he is the head of the Firm’s Private Side Businesses. Prior to joining Silver Point, Mr. Gatto worked at Goldman Sachs as a senior member within the Special Situations Investing Business. 

Kristin Gilbertson is the Chief Investment Officer at Access Industries, a private holding company.  She was previously the Chief Investment Officer for the University of Pennsylvania, which she joined in 2004 after having served as a Managing Director at the Stanford Management Company.  She began her investment career at the World Bank in Washington, DC, which she joined as a YP in 1992.  She holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in Economics from Harvard University.  Kristin has recently completed her first term as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business S

Michael Grad is an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia GSB and received a Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence in 2011. Through December 2008, Professor Grad was an investment banker for 25 years with several Wall Street firms. His areas of expertise include financial sponsor banking, leveraged finance and LBOs, debt restructuring and bankruptcy, and M&A. Since the beginning of 2009, Professor Grad has been a Senior Managing Director in the Restructuring Group at AIG.

Professor Gundlach is a Director of Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Advisers LLC, an investment firm based in New York City. He was formerly with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and ING/Artemis Advisors LLC. He received his MBA (2001) from Columbia Business School and his BS (1993) and MS (1994) degrees from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Trustee of the American Academy in Berlin.

David B. Haber is a member of the Tech Group and the M&A and Corporate Finance Practice Group. Mr. Haber has extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions and venture capital transactions, with an emphasis on buying and selling venture-backed companies. During his career, he has played a significant role in over $10 billion worth of transactions, with a concentration on transactions in the technology and life sciences sectors. Mr.

Scott Hendrickson is a Partner and the Co-Founder of Permian Investment Partners, a $1.2 billion management-focused global long/short investment fund. Prior to co-founding Permian, Mr. Hendrickson worked at Brahman Capital as an Investment Analyst. Prior to Brahman, Mr. Hendrickson worked as an Associate at Industrial Growth Partners, a middle-market focused private equity fund.  Mr. Hendrickson started his career as an Analyst in Merrill Lynch’s Investment Banking Program. Mr.

David Horn is the Managing Partner of Kiron Advisors LLC which serves as the Investment Advisor for Kiron Partners L.P. Prior to founding the firm in 2006, Mr. Horn served as a research analyst at Perennial Partners, a long/short value oriented fund, from 2004-2005. At Perennial, he was a generalist, covering long and short investments of varying sizes across a range of industry groups. In 2003, he served as a research analyst at the Hummingbird Value Funds, a long only, value oriented, micro-cap fund. While attending Columbia Business School, Mr.

Takatoshi Ito is one of Japan premier economists. A professor at the prestigious University of Tokyo, he is the author or co-author of several books on the Japanese and global economy. He served in the Japanese government as Deputy Vice Minister for International Finance in the Ministry of Finance and was a member of Japan’s Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy. He has been a senior advisor in the research department of the International Monetary Fund and has taught at Harvard University and the University of Minnesota.

Andrew Jacobs is a Managing Director and Partner at Metropolitan Real Estate Equity Management, having joined the firm in 2008. Professor Jacobs is responsible for identifying, evaluating and overseeing real estate private equity fund managers and investment opportunities. Investments span the capital stack, property types and global markets, but his focus is managers based in the eastern United States and Brazil. Professor Jacobs also seeks and reviews opportunities to purchase interests in underlying funds on the secondary market.

Professor Johnson runs Nicusa Investment Advisors, an advisory firm focused on helping CEOs and Boards of Directors deal with strategy, capital allocation, shareholder value creation, and corporate governance. Johnson applies his 35 years of experience as an investment professional, combined with his 30 years as a business school professor, to help senior managers sort through these critical strategic issues.

Ron Kravit is a Senior Managing Director of Tracker Capital, a stage agnostic venture capital firm that principally invests in emerging technologies that advance national security. Currently, Mr. Kravit is a senior advisor to several other companies including Hello Alfred, a technology and service company focused on residential real estate sector, Platform Ventures, and Harridge Development Company. Prior to joining Tracker Capital, Mr. Kravit was at Cerberus Capital Management for 22 years, where he was most recently Co- Head of North American Real Estate and a Senior Managing Director.

Daniel Krueger is a Partner at Owl Creek Asset Management, a hedge fund based in New York, where he is the Global Head of Credit and Co-Portfolio Manager. Mr. Krueger has been with Owl Creek since its inception in February 2002.  Owl Creek invests in event-driven value opportunities across all parts of the capital structure, and Mr. Krueger focuses much of his time on distressed securities. Prior to Owl Creek, Mr. Krueger worked at Angelo Gordon and Chase Securities Inc.

Blake Liggio is a partner in Goodwin’s Real Estate Industry group. Mr. Liggio focuses on mergers and acquisitions, including the representation of acquirers, targets, boards of directors, transaction committees and investment banks. He also advises clients on a range of corporate matters, including fiduciary duties, corporate governance, federal securities law disclosure and compliance, and defensive measures.

Keith Luh is a portfolio manager and head of cross asset investing for the Mutual Series group at Franklin Templeton focused on value and event-driven opportunities across equity and fixed income investments, globally. Prior to joining Mutual Series, Mr. Luh was an analyst in global investment research at Putnam Investments, where he also helped manage a best-ideas research fund. Previously, he worked in the investment banking group at Volpe Brown Whelan and Co., LLC, and the derivative products trading group at BNP. Mr.