Ritter again receives William F. Sharpe Award from prestigious finance journal

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Joe B. Cordell Eminent Scholar Chair Dr. Jay Ritter was named a co-recipient of the 2013 William F. Sharpe Award for Scholarship in Financial Research.

Sharing the Sharpe Award with Dr. Ritter are Xiaohui Gao Bakshi, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business, and Zhong Yan Zhu, an Assistant Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Dr. Gao Bakshi earned her Ph.D. in Finance from the Warrington College of Business Administration in 2008.

The Sharpe Award recognizes the best article published each year in the Journal of Financial Quantitative Analysis. Dr. Ritter and his fellow researchers were recognized for their work, “Where Have All the IPOs Gone?” which appeared in the December 2013 issue of JFQA.

This is the second time Dr. Ritter has received the Sharpe Award. He was previously recognized for his 2009 work, “Testing Theories of Capital Structure and Estimating the Speed of Adjustment,” with co-author Dr. Rongbing Huang. Dr. Huang is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Kennesaw State University (Ga.), who earned his Ph.D. in Finance at Warrington in 2004.

Dr. Ritter joins Dr. Paula Tkac, Vice President and Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, as the only two-time recipients of the Sharpe Award.

Dr. Ritter’s research focuses on Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), and he is one of the world’s authorities on the subject. He teaches corporate finance at the undergraduate, MBA and Ph.D. levels. Before joining the Warrington faculty in 1996, he previously served on the faculties of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the University of Michigan, and the University of Illinois, and was a visiting professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

William F. Sharpe won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990, and is an Emeritus Professor of Finance at Stanford University.