Barclays Global Investors has announced the appointments of leading academic and industry experts who have joined its global research staff.
Barclays Global Investors has announced the appointments of leading academic and industry experts who have joined its global research staff.
BGI has built one of the largest scientific research organizations in asset management, with an annual commitment to research of over USD 120 million.
Paul Harrison has joined as Research Officer, where he will focus on sovereign bond research. Harrison comes to BGI from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, where he was Chief, Capital Markets Section. Harrison has focused his current research on the impact of US companies’ investment in human capital on stock prices, timing of debt issuance and rating migrations, and value destruction in multinational operations. Prior to the Federal Reserve, he was Professor of Economics at Brandeis University.
Richard Sloan has joined as Director of Accounting Research, where his focus will be the design of equity stock selection models. Sloan was the Victor L. Bernard PriceWaterhouseCoopers Collegiate Professor of Accounting and Director, Financial Research and Trading Center, at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Sloan’s expertise has focused on the role of accounting information in investment decisions, and won the 2001 Account Literature Award for his research on earnings quality. Mr. Sloan’s research has been regularly featured in leading business publications.
Mark P. Taylor joined as Managing Director, and will focus on currency research out of BGI’s London office. Taylor was Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Warwick, UK. Taylor’s research interests include exchange-rate economics, applied econometrics, international macroeconomics, and economic policy. Taylor founded the International Journal of Finance and Economics in 1994.
William Gebhardt has joined as Research Officer where his focus will be on European equity stock selection models. Gebhardt was Assistant Professor of Finance, Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis. Gebhardt’s research interests have involved empirical asset pricing and market efficiency, behavioral finance, performance of professional traders, and information arbitrage. He was formerly Director, Trading Strategy, with Merrill Lynch Commodities International in London.
Scott Richardson has joined as Head of US Credit Research overseeing fixed income credit research for the firm. Richardson was Assistant Professor of Accounting, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His research includes firm valuation, corporate governance, earnings management, accounting and contracting. Richardson was on the editorial advisory and review board, Accounting Review, and was formerly in the accounting and advisory practice with KPMG Peat Marwick.
Oren Cheyette has joined as Senior Research Officer where he will focus on mortgage research to support BGI’s alpha forecasting models. Cheyette was Executive Director, New Products Research with MSCI BARRA, where he was responsible for exploration, design and development of new research products. Prior to this, he was Executive Director, Fixed Income Research for BARRA, Inc. He has published numerous papers including a notable paper on empirical credit risk.
Daniel Bergstresser has joined as Head of European Credit Research where he will focus on credit research in the UK. Bergstresser was Assistant Professor in the Finance Unit at Harvard University. His research has covered a variety of areas including impact of taxation, regulation, and market structure on the operation of financial markets, and he has been cited in numerous national news and business publications.
Navneet Arora has joined as Research Officer where he will focus on Canadian and Credit Research. Arora was a Director in the research group at Moody’s KMV. He has a PhD in Finance from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has published numerous papers on credit risk and developed KMV’s default risk model.
Marian Micu has joined as Senior Research Analyst, where he will focus on currency research. Micu was with the Bank for International Settlements where he filled the role of Research Analyst providing expertise in the areas of foreign exchange markets, volatility modeling, and derivatives pricing. During the past 5 years, he also held visiting positions as Lecturer with the Joint Vienna Institute and Assistant Professor in Applied Economics, University of Paris.
Kayvan Malek has joined as a Research Officer, where he will focus on the alpha commodity model. Malek was a portfolio manager for 42 Capital LLC, a boutique energy commodity asset management firm. Prior to this, he spent seven years in the energy trading section building and managing trading groups for two of the largest merchant trading firms in the US.
Background note: Barclays Global Investors is one of the world’s largest asset managers providing structured investment strategies such as risk-controlled active strategies and indexing. In the U.S., BGI is one of the largest active managers, set apart by its risk-controlled approach. BGI manages 65% of the world’s 100 largest pension plans and is the global leader in assets and products in exchange traded funds through its iShares brand with more than 180 ETFs globally. The firm managed over USD 1.6 trillion in assets as of 6/30/06, for more than 2,800 clients in 52 countries around the world. BGI is a majority-owned subsidiary of Barclays Bank PLC
