Profile: Michael R. Roberts

Michael R. Roberts
Associate Professor of Finance
The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania 3620 Locust Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104 Phone: (215) 573-9780 Fax: (215) 898-6200 Email: mrrobert@wharton.upenn.edu

CURRICULUM VITAE

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PRIOR ACADEMIC POSITIONS

Assistant Professor of Finance, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2004-2008
Assistant Professor of Finance, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 2001-2004
Lecturer, Department of Statistics, University of California at Berkeley, 2000-2001

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Economics, University of California at Berkeley, 2001
M.A. Statistics, University of California at Berkeley, 2001
B.A., Economics, University of California at San Diego , 1992

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Financial Contracting
Security Design
Capital Structure
Payout Policy
Investment Policy
Applied Econometrics
Stochastic Filtering Theory

PUBLICATIONS

"The Response of Corporate Financing and Investment to Changes in the Supply of Credit," with Michael Lemmon, forthcoming Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis
"Renegotiation of Financial Contracts: Evidence from Private Credit Agreements," with Amir Sufi, forthcoming Journal of Financial Economics
"Control Rights and Capital Structure: An Empirical Investigation," with Amir Sufi, forthcoming Journal of Finance
"Evidence on the Tradeoff Between Risk and Return for IPO and SEO Firms," with Alon Brav, Roni Michaely, and Rebecca Zarutskie, forthcoming Financial Management
"How does Financing Impact Investment? The Role of Debt Covenants," with Sudheer Chava, Journal of Finance 2008, 63, 2085 - 2121
"Back to the Beginning: Persistence and the Cross-Section of Corporate Capital Structure," with Michael Lemmon and Jaime Zender, Journal of Finance, 2008, 63, 1575 - 1608
"On the Importance of Measuring Payout Yield: Implications for Empirical Asset Pricing," with Jacob Boudoukh, Roni Michaely, and Matthew Richardson, Journal of Finance, 2007, 62, 877 - 915

Data (Updated Annual & Monthly Series):	Time Series Data for Dividend, Payout, and Net Payout Yields (Excel File)

"Do Firms Rebalance Their Capital Structures?," with Mark T. Leary, Journal of Finance, 2005, 60, 2575 - 2619

Awards:	Financial Management Association, Best Paper in Corporate Finance, 2004,
	Southwestern Finance Association, Best Paper in Corporate Finance, 2004,
	Brattle Prize for Distinguished Paper in the Journal of Finance, 2006

"An Empirical Examination of Deregulated Electricity Prices," with Christopher R. Knittel, Energy Economics, 2005, 27, 791 - 817
"Do Price Discreteness and Transactions Costs Affect Stock Returns? Comparing Ex-Dividend Pricing Before and After Decimalization," with John Graham and Roni Michaely, Journal of Finance, 2003, 58, 2611-2635
"Response to King's Comment," with David Freedman, Stephen Klein, and Michael Ostland, Journal of the American Statistical Association, March, 1999
"On 'Solutions' to the Ecological Inference Problem," Journal of the American Statistical Association, with David Freedman, Stephen Klein, and Michael Ostland, December, 1998
"Consumption and Savings Balances of the Elderly: Experimental Evidence on Survery Response Bias," with Michael Hurd, Daniel McFadden, Harish Chand, Li Gan, and Angela Merrill, Frontiers in the Economics of Aging, edited by David Wise, 1998, National Bureau of Economic Research

WORKING PAPERS

"Corporate Dividend Policies: Lessons from Private Firms," with Roni Michaely, 2006
"The Pecking Order, Debt Capacity, and Information Asymmetry," with Mark T. Leary, 2008
"The Structure and Pricing of Debt Covenants," with Michael Bradley, 2003 (formerly entitled "Are Bond Covenants Priced?")
"The Dynamics of Capital Structure: An Empirical Analysis of a Partially Observable System," 2001, (Chapter 3 of dissertation and job market paper),
"A Continuous Time Kalman Filter," 2001, (Chapter 2 of dissertation).
"Parameter Estimation in a Mixed Stock-Flow State Space Framework with Contemporaneous Correlation," 2001, (Chapter 3 of dissertation).
"Parameter Estimation in Continuous State Hidden Markov Models," 2001 (Statistics M.A. Thesis)
"An Empirical Analysis of Deregulated Electricity Prices," with Christopher Knittel, University of California Energy Institute Power Working Papers, PWP-087

DISCUSSIONS

2008 American Finance Association Meetings, "Common Flaws in Empirical Capital Structure Research," by Ivo Welch
2007 NBER Market Microstructure Conference "The Role of Institutional Investors in Seasoned Equity Offerings," by Thomas Chemmanur, Shan He, and Gang Hu
2007 NBER Corporate Finance Summer Institute "The Effects of Financial Condition on Capital Investment and Financing: Evidence from Variation in Pension Fund Asset Performance," by Josh Rauh
2007 Michigan Mitsui Conference, "Why Do Public Firms Issue Private and Public Securities?," by Armando Gomes and Gordon Phillips
2007 IDC Caesarea Center Conference on Finance, "Sympathetic Boards: Director Networks and Firm Governance," by Amir Barnea and Ilan Guedj
2007 American Finance Association Meetings, "The Real Effects of Debt Certification: Evidence from the Introduction of Bank Loan Ratings," by Amir Sufi
2006 Western Finance Association Meetings, "The Mystery of Zero-Leverage Firms," by Ilya Strebulaev and Bauzhong Yang
2006 Western Finance Association Meetings, "Do Firms Target Credit Ratings or Leverage Levels," by Darren Kisgen
2006 NBER Capital Markets and the Economy Summer Institute Workshop "Is Cash Negative Debt? A Hedging Perspective on Corporate Financial Policies," by Viral Acharya, Heitor Almeida, and Murillo Campello
2006 Financial Management Association Meetings, "Pricing and Performance of Loans Concurrent with Underwriting," by Yang Lu
2005 Western Finance Association Meetings, "How is Value Created in Spin-Offs? A Look Inside the Black Box," by Thomas Chemmanur and Debarshi Nandy
2005 Western Finance Association Meetings, "Do Liquidation Values Affect Financial Contracts? Evidence From Commerical Loan Contracts and Zoning Regulation," by Efraim Benmelech, Mark Garmaise, and Toby Moskowitz
2005 Utah Winter Finance Conference, "How Do Family Ownership, Control, and Management Affect Firm Value?," by Belen Villalonga and Raphael Amit
2005 American Finance Association Meetings, "On the Relation Between the Market-to-Book Ratio, Growth Opportunity, and Leverage Ratio," by Long Chen and Xinlei Zhao
2005 American Finance Association Meetings, "Why Are Stock Buyback Announcements Good News?," by Allan Eberhart and Akhtar Siddique
2004 Financial Management Association Meetings, "Divergence of Opinion Surrounding Extreme Events," by Tim Loughran and Jennifer Marietta-Westberg
2004 American Finance Association Meetings, "Marginal Stockholder Tax Effects and Ex-Dividend Day Behavior: Thirty-Two Years Later," by Edwin Elton, Martin Gruber, and Christopher Blake

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Introductory Finance (Asset Pricing and Corporate Finance for MBAs, Undergraduates)
Corporate Capital Structure (Executive Education)
Mathematics for Economists (Doctoral)
Econometric Theory (Doctoral)
Introductory Probablility and Statistics (Undergraduate)
Statistical Inference for The Social Sciences (Undergraduate)
Introductory Macroeconomics (Undergraduate)

NONACADEMIC EXPERIENCE

Financial Engineer, Financial Engineering Associates, Berkeley, California, 5/98 - 10/98; 6/99 - 9/99.
Senior Analyst/Programmer, Cedars-Sinai Health System, Los Angeles, California, 1/96 - 9/96.
Senior Analyst, Regional Economic Research Inc., San Diego, California, 1/94 - 1/95
Economic Analyst/Programmer, Regional Economic Research Inc., San Diego, California, 1/92 - 12/94

OTHER LINKS

Last updated on July 1, 2008