The Department of Finance and the Master of Science in Quantitative Finance program would like to invite you to a seminar by professor Russ Wermers. He is the Paul J. Cinquegrana ’63 endowed chair in finance and director of the Center for Financial Policy at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland at College Park. His main research interests include studies of the efficiency of securities markets, as well as the role of institutional investors in setting stock prices. In addition, he studies and teaches quantitative equity strategies, and is currently researching microfinance institutions in Thailand. Most notably, his past research has developed new approaches to measuring and attributing the performance of mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds, as well as devising winning strategies for investing in these funds.

Professor Wermers also studies the investment behavior of these asset managers, as well as the impact of their trades on stock markets. His papers have been published in leading scholarly journals, such as The American Economic Review, The Review of Financial Studies, The Journal of Financial Economics, and The Journal of Finance. His article on mutual fund “herding” and stock prices (Journal of Finance, 1999) won the NYSE Award for the Best Paper on Equity Trading in 1995. His coauthored article on mutual fund performance was a finalist for the Smith-Breeden Award for the Best Paper in the Journal of Finance during 2006/2007.

Professor Wermers consults for the hedge fund, pension fund, and mutual fund industries. He is coauthor of a book on the latest scientific approaches to performance evaluation and attribution of professional fund managers, written for academics and practitioners (published in December 2012). He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in December 1995. The title of the seminar paper is: "Politically Smart: Political Sentiment Signaling of Private Enterprises."