Weathering the Economic Climate

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Weathering the Economic Climate, was held Monday, December 3, 2008 at the Geva Theatre, with Daniel J. Burnside, director of Quantitative Research at Clover Capital Management; Ronald H. Fielding, senior vice president at Oppenheimer Funds; G. William Schwert, Distinguished University Professor and professor of finance and statistics at the Simon School; Clifford W. Smith Jr., Louise and Henry Epstein Professor of Business Administration, professor of finance and economics at the Simon School; and Toni M. Whited, Kuechenmeister-Bascom Professor of Finance at the University of Wisconsin School of Business. The panel as moderated by Simon School Dean Mark Zupan.

Moderator

Simon School Dean Mark Zupan
Co-Sponsored by Geva Theatre Center and the Rochester Business Journal.

Panelists

• Daniel J. Burnside '01, director of Quantitative Research at Clover Capital Management, an adjunct lecturer in finance at Simon and a chartered financial analyst and certified financial planner
• Ronald H. Fielding '76, senior vice president at Oppenheimer Funds
• G. William Schwert, distinguished university professor and professor of finance and statistics at the Simon School, an expert in stock market volatility
• Clifford W. Smith Jr., Louise and Henry Epstein Professor of business administration, professor of finance and economics at the Simon School.
• Toni M. Whited, Kuechenmeister-Bascom Professor of finance, University of Wisconsin
   

Panelist Biographies

Daniel J. Burnside is director of Quantitative Research at Rochester money manager Clover Capital Management and lecturer in finance at the Simon School. He has held various roles in the investment, risk management and financial planning fields, and has worked extensively with both individual and institutional clientele. Burnside is a chartered financial analyst and a certified financial planner. He earned his BS, MS, and PhD degrees from Cornell University and his MBA from the Simon School.

Ronald H. Fielding is senior vice president at Oppenheimer Funds where he supervises $27.5 billion in assets. A chartered financial analyst, he has been active in the investment markets for more than twenty-five years and is a nationally recognized expert in municipal bond funds. He was president and founder of three Rochester Funds which he sold to Oppenheimer in 1996 and continues to manage. Fielding earned his BA in economics from St. John’s College and his MBA from the Simon School.

G. William Schwert is Distinguished University Professor and professor of finance and statistics at the Simon School. His award-winning research on stock market volatility has been published in major academic journals including The Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Financial Analysts Journal. Professor Schwert has been an editor of the Journal of Financial Economics since 1979 and the managing editor since 1995. His current research deals with the pricing of initial public offerings of stock, the effects of insider trading on the market for corporate control, the effects of anti-takeover devices on takeover activity, and on stock market volatility. He holds an AB degree in economics from Trinity College and an MBA and PhD in finance and econometrics from the University of Chicago.

Clifford W. Smith Jr. is the Louise and Henry Epstein Professor of Business Administration and professor of finance and economics at the Simon School. His research interests are in corporate financial policy, derivative securities, and financial intermediation. He has published 16 books and over 90 articles in leading finance and economics journals. He has been given the Superior Teaching Award by the full-time and executive MBA classes at the Simon School 10 times and 19 times, respectively.

He has received numerous national awards for his teaching and research. He is an advisory editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, an associate editor of several leading academic journals including of the Journal of Risk and Insurance, among others. He is widely known for his award-winning research in the finance and insurance fields.

Toni M. Whited is the Kuechenmeister-Bascom Professor at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She earned a BA from the University of Oregon, majoring in French literature and economics, and a PhD from Princeton University in economics, working with Ben Bernanke. Professor Whited worked at the Federal Reserve Board and was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Iowa before joining the University of Wisconsin in 2003. In July 2009, she will be joining the Simon School faculty. Professor Whited has taught in a wide variety of areas in finance, macroeconomics, and econometrics at the undergraduate, MBA, and doctoral levels. She has published over 20 articles and has twice won a Brattle Prize for one of the top articles in the Journal of Finance in Corporate Finance. Her research deals primarily with the effects of financial markets on firm capital budgeting decisions. She has also conducted research in the areas of theoretical econometrics, asset pricing, macroeconomics, and corporate debt policy. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Macroeconomics and was one of the founding co-editors of Finance Research Letters.