The Yale School of Management (SOM), which last summer received the University's commitment to increase senior faculty by 60 percent, has taken a major step toward fulfilling those faculty recruitment plans and made school history by announcing seven new appointments.

They span the disciplines of finance, accounting, economics and business strategy. The school's small student body of 431 M.B.A. candidates will remain the same size.

"As scholars and teachers, these professors have made extraordinary contributions to their diverse and respective fields," Yale SOM Dean Jeffrey E. Garten said. "They form a stunning constellation of expertise, in the interrelated fields of finance, economics and accounting.

"We are developing one of the world's foremost international institutions for financial research," Dean Garten explained. "These new appointments will give us prominence as a world-class investment management group, one of the finest derivatives groups in the country, and an exceptionally strong concentration of scholars focused on urban economics, trade and business strategy."

Several of the new professors will be affiliated with Yale SOM's International Center for Finance, which will be housed in a fully restored historic Yale mansion on Hillhouse Avenue, and will open in September. This global financial center will gather scholars from throughout the University and the world to work on key problems and issues confronting global markets and corporations. The center seeks to create stronger links among key areas and departments at Yale. Center fellows will be drawn from the finance, accounting, economics and marketing groups at SOM, as well as from the Law School and the departments of economics, statistics and mathematics.

The seven new Yale SOM faculty appointments include scholars with a wide range of interests and expertise.

Four of the scholars will join the Yale SOM staff as tenured faculty. They are: Professor of Finance Hua He, an award-winning scholar in mathematical finance and option pricing; Professor of Finance Zhiwu Chen, considered one of the most creative and active theorists in financial asset pricing today; Professor of Finance Matthew Spiegel, a leading expert on trading in capital markets as well as on the dynamics of housing markets; and Professor of Accounting, Economics and Business Shyam Sunder, a leading experiential economist and a major contributor to the areas of the economic theory of accounting, behavioral economics and the statistical theory of valuation.

Three of the new faculty will assume tenure-track posts. They are: Assistant Professor of Finance Jeffrey Wurgler, a broad-ranging scholar who works on U.S. and international investment; Associate Professor of Economics Fiona M. Scott Morton, who has received acclaim for her work in global competitive strategy; and Assistant Professor of Economics Peter K. Schott, whose current research interests include international trade and finance.

"This stunning success in faculty recruiting will help to propel Yale SOM to the front ranks of the nation's business schools," said President Richard C. Levin. "We are delighted that seven outstanding scholars will be joining us."

Brief profiles of the new faculty follow:

FINANCE

Hua He
Professor of Finance

Recipient of the prestigious Batterymarch Fellowship in Finance in 1992-93, which recognized him as one of the top untenured scholars in Finance, Hua He is an expert in derivatives analysis and in continuous-time asset price modeling. Most recently he was a principal in Convergence Asset Management, LLC, and he served previously as managing directors of U.S. and Japanese Proprietary Trading for Salomon Brothers, Inc. Before leaving academia for Wall Street, He's research focused on consumption and portfolio choice. He taught as associate professor of finance, with tenure, at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a Ph.D. in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. from Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He has held associate editorships for Mathematical Finance and the Review of Financial Studies, and currently serves as associate editor for the Financial Analysts Journal. .

Zhiwu Chen
Professor of Finance

Zhiwu Chen, whose research examines the social dimensions of capital markets and how international markets are integrated, holds a Ph.D in operations research from Yale. He also earned an M.S. in systems analysis from Changsha Institute of Technology in China and a B.S. in computer science from Central-South University of Technology, China. Chen is a frequent contributor to top economics and finance journals with research papers ranging from novel means of pricing options to studies of foreign exchange, market integration and mutual funds. Previously, he was associate professor of finance, with tenure, at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.

Matthew Spiegel
Professor of Finance

An expert on the market micro-structure of capital markets, Matthew Spiegel has pursued a wide range of research in finance, from housing markets to corporate finance and experimental economics. He is a leading theorist whose overlapping generations models help explain such phenomena as market volatility and security price deviations from fundamental values. With Professor William Goetzmann of SOM, he has developed new methods for estimating housing price indices that show that income, not racial characteristics, is the major determinant of home location choice. Spiegel holds a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a B.A. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He was formerly an associate professor, with tenure, at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. He is coeditor of the Journal of Financial Markets and served as associate editor of the Review of Financial Studies for a three-year term.

Jeffrey Wurgler
Assistant Professor of Finance

A broad-ranging scholar who works on issues of importance to investors, Jeffrey Wurgler analyzes the link between efficiency of investment and development of capital markets. He is receiving a Ph.D. in business economics from Harvard University, where he was awarded a Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Fellowship, HBS Graduate Fellowship and HBS Thesis Research Grant. In addition, he earned a B.A.S. in economics and computational sciences from Stanford University, where he earned the Myers award for his outstanding economics honors thesis. He has teaching experience in Harvard University's Department of Economics.

ACCOUNTING

Shyam Sunder
Professor of Accounting, Economics and Business

Shyam Sunder is a leading experiential economist whose work is focused on behavioral economics, the economic theory of accounting and the statistical theory of valuation. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to that, he studied mechanical engineering at the I.R. School of Engineering in Jamalpur, India. He is the author of "Theory of Accounting and Control, Experimental Methods: A Primer for Economists" (with Daniel Friedman) and a wide array of monographs and edited volumes.

ECONOMICS

Fiona M. Scott Morton
Associate Professor of Economics

Before coming to Yale, Fiona Scott Morton was assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. Previously, she was assistant professor of strategic management at Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in economics from Yale. Her articles are published widely in periodicals including the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, the RAND Journal of Economics, the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of Industrial Economics and the International Journal of Industrial Organization.

Peter K. Schott
Assistant Professor of Economics

A rising scholar in the areas of international trade and finance, Peter Schott's research and teaching interests also include econometrics, microeconomics and macroeconomics. He holds a Ph.D. in business economics from the Anderson Graduate School of Management, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), as well as a master's degree in political science from UCLA and a B.S. in finance from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been invited to present his research on international trade and finance to a wide array of international and domestic forums and universities, including Purdue University, the National Cheng Chi University in Taipei, the University of San Diego and the Anderson Graduate School of Management.

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