Keynote speakers

Professor Michael Waterson
PhD Director
Department of Economics
University of Warwick, UK
E-mail: michael.waterson@warwick.ac.uk

Paper:  Empirical methods in industrial organization- science or art?

Michael Waterson is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, where he has been since 1991. He held previous academic posts at the Universities of Reading and Newcastle and was President of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics and Chair of the (UK) Network of Industrial Economists. He was also General Editor of the ‘Journal of Industrial Economics’ for five years.

His research lies broadly within the field of industrial economics, most recently in the areas of supermarket pricing and in energy markets at wholesale and retail levels. It also includes competition policy and consumer behavior, regulation, access pricing and the comparative analysis of regulatory regimes.

He has published widely in a variety of areas of industrial economics in a range of journals and books and his work is very well cited, with over 4000 Google Scholar cites. Between 2005 and 2013 he has been a Member of the Competition Commission, where he has worked on a number of merger cases and one market investigation. He has also served as Specialist Adviser to Subcommittee B of the European Union Committee of the House of Lords.

Sara Fisher Ellison
Senior Lecturer
Department of Economics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
E-mail: sellison@mit.edu

Paper:   An empirical study of pricing strategies in an online market with high-frequency price information

Sara Fisher Ellison is currently Senior Lecturer in the MIT Economics Department, and has previously been the Richard B. Fisher member at the Institute for Advanced Study (2003-2004), the Arch Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (1999-2000), and a Research Economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research (1992-1994). Her recent research has investigated a number of questions in industrial organization, with a focus on the pharmaceutical industry and ecommerce.

Her work on the pharmaceutical industry has been wide-ranging, addressing issues such as the characteristics of demand for similar products, the political economy of pharmaceutical pricing, and the strategic behavior of pharmaceutical manufacturers. In ecommerce, her best known research involves the study of search and obfuscation. She and her coauthor Glenn Ellison have found evidence that Internet technologies, once believed to primarily aid consumers by making price search much easier, can actually serve the interests of retailers as well, by making age-old obfuscation strategies easier and cheaper to implement. She also has work on the sugar industry as well as methodological contributions in finance and econometrics.

She is an award-winning teacher, and her courses include econometrics and industrial organization at the Ph.D. level, econometrics and applied microeconomics at the MBA level, and econometrics at the undergraduate levels. She is active in undergraduate and Ph.D. advising. She currently serves on the editorial board of three industrial organization journals, IJIO, JIE, and RIO. She also has consulting experience, providing litigation support and management guidance.

William L. Megginson
Professor and Rainbolt Chair in Finance
Division of Finance
Michael F. Price College of Business
University of Oklahoma, USA

Paper:  Prestige without purpose? What a top underwriter’s reputation is really worth

Bill Megginson is Professor and Rainbolt Chair in Finance at the University of Oklahoma's Michael F. Price College of Business. He is also the Saudi Aramco Chair Professor in Finance at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Professor Megginson's research interest has focused in recent years on the privatization of state-owned enterprises, sovereign wealth fund investments, and investment banking principles and practices.

He has published refereed articles in several top academic journals, including the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Foreign Policy. His co-authored study documenting significant performance improvements in recently privatized companies received one of two Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper Awards for outstanding research published in the Journal of Finance during 1994. He is author or co-author of nine textbooks. He received the University of Oklahoma's top research prize, a George Lynn Cross Research Professorship, in April 2010.

Professor Megginson's research has been frequently cited in academic and professional publications. His articles have been downloaded over 45,000 times from the Social Sciences Research Network, and his books and articles have been cited over 10,900 times (according to Google Scholar). He is associate editor for two academic journals, and has served as a privatization consultant for the New York Stock Exchange, the OECD, the IMF, the World Federation of Exchanges, and the World Bank. 

Yuri Tserlukevich is an assistant professor in the Department of Finance at the ASU W. P. Carey School of Business at the Arizona State University. Before joining the faculty at ASU in the fall of 2009, Dr. Tserlukevich taught as an assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for three years. Previous to that appointment, Dr. Tserlukevich was a visiting scholar in the Finance Department at UCLA. After receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics from Belarus State University and University of Minnesota, respectively, Dr. Tserlukevich received a Ph.D in finance from University of California, Berkeley in 2006.

Dr. Tserlukevich’s research focuses on the areas of corporate finance, real options, compensation, and capital structure. His work has been published in a number of scholarly journals including Journal of Finance, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Portfolio Management, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Financial Economics. Dr. Tserlukevich is the director of ASU’s Ph.D. program in finance. He currently teaches courses focused on managerial finance, corporate finance, and theoretical foundations at both the undergraduate and graduate level.