Flannery, Nimalendran win best paper honors
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Bank of America Eminent Scholar Chair Dr. Mark Flannery and John H. and Mary Lou Dasburg Chair Dr. Mahendrarajah (Nimal) Nimalendran received the Stuart Greenbaum Award recognizing the “Most Significant Paper” published in the Journal of Financial Intermediation in 2013.
Additionally, Dr. Flannery was also honored with the Jensen Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics in the areas of Corporate Finance and Organizations in 2013.
Dr. Flannery, Dr. Nimalendran and Simon Kwan, co-author and Vice President of Financial Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, received the Greenbaum Award for their work, “The 2007-09 Financial Crisis and Bank Opaqueness,” which appeared in the January 2013 issue of JFI.
The paper examined the trading characteristics of bank shares over a span of 20 years (1990-2009), and found that those characteristics differed sharply before and during the financial crisis. The researchers found that large banking firms appeared to not be more opaque than a set of control firms, and that small banking firms were slightly more opaque. During the financial crisis, however, both large and small banking firms increased in opacity. They conclude that bank opacity can lead to instability, therefore, requiring the government to stabilize the situation.
Dr. Flannery and Leming Lin, who earned a Ph.D. in Finance this year from Warrington, and will be an Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Pittsburgh this fall, received the Jensen Award for their work, “Do Personal Taxes Affect Capital Structure: Evidence from the 2003 Tax Cut.” The paper appeared in the August 2013 issue of the Journal of Financial Economics.
The paper explored the effect of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 on firms’ debt usage, and found that the tax cut caused the affected firms’ leverage to decrease by as much as five percentage points. They concluded that personal tax is an important determinant of firms’ optimal leverage.
Dr. Flannery teaches corporate finance and financial management of financial institutions at the graduate level and his research has explored government regulation of the financial sector. He has served as a Senior Advisor to the Department of Treasury’s Office of Financial Research, Resident Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and as an Advisory Committee member on the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Center for Financial Innovation and Financial Stability among other appointments.
Dr. Flannery received a Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University in 1972, and earned a Master of Arts in Economics (1973), an M. Phil in Economics (1974) and a Ph.D. in Economics (1978) all from Yale University.
Dr. Nimalendran’s research is in the areas of market microstructure, derivatives, investments, hedge funds and econometrics and empirical methods in finance. His research has been published in leading finance and economics journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and the Journal of Econometrics.
In his 24 years at Warrington, Dr. Nimalendran has taught at the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral levels. He received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Sri Lanka (1973), a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Hawaii (1978), and an MBA (1986) and Ph.D. in Business Administration—Finance (1990) from the University of Michigan.
