The Henry Thornton Lecture Series, inaugurated in 1979 and hosted by the Centre for Banking Research at Bayes Business School, focuses on monetary theory and monetary policy, and finance.
Professor Martin Schmalz will deliver this year's Henry Thornton Lecture which is titled "Do index funds benefit society?"
Index funds have reduced the cost of diversification and thus helped to democratize investment. What's not to like? This lecture delineates recent research indicating side effects and equilibrium effects of indexing. Side effects include concerns about governance and competition of portfolio firms, which may help explain the secular decline in productivity and other macroeconomic trends. Equilibrium effects refer to the idea that increased stock market participation drives up equity prices and thus reduces expected returns, which harms investor welfare. As a result, the tally of winners and losers of one of the most successful innovations in finance may look quite different than previously assumed.
18:00 - Registration and refreshments
18:30 - Welcome followed by presentation from Professor Martin Schmalz
19:20 - Q&A
19:40 - Networking and refreshments
Professor Martin Schmalz
Professor of Finance and Economics & Head of the Finance, Accounting, Management & Economics Area, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Martin Schmalz is Professor of Finance and Economics, Head of the Finance, Accounting, Management, and Economics Area, Academic Director of the Blockchain Strategy Programme, and co-director of the Open Banking & AI in Finance Programme at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. Before joining Oxford with tenure, he was Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Michigan, USA.
He co-authored “The Business of Big Data: How to Create Lasting Value in the Age of AI”, and was featured as one of the “40 under 40” best business school professors worldwide at the age of 33. He was invited to present to regulators and policy makers across the globe, including the US Department of Justice, The White House Council of Economic Advisers, European Commission, European Parliament, OECD, various central banks, and at universities across America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
His prize-winning research focuses on corporate governance and asset management. It has been published in the Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies, and was covered, among others, by The New York Times, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Forbes, Fortune, Handelsblatt, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
He holds a graduate degree (Dipl.-Ing.) in mechanical engineering from the Universität Stuttgart (Germany) and a M.A. and PhD in Economics from Princeton University (USA).
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