The Carr and Stephanie Bettis Distinguished Scholar Award Program is making it possible for two top-notch finance researchers to spend one week in residence at Arizona State University to contribute to intellectual discourse in the W. P. Carey School of Business Department of Finance.

Every year, one or two Bettis Scholars are named, and invited to give a seminar presentation to department faculty and students, as well as a lecture to doctoral students on topics of their choosing. The scholarship includes a $5,000 honorarium.

Carr and Stephanie Bettis, who created the Bettis Scholar Award Program, founded Gradient Analytics, Inc., one of the country’s leading independent financial research firms, which employs ASU finance graduates.

The program is right in line with their belief in the importance of giving back to the community, which they’ve both done by taking active roles in various charitable and philanthropic efforts.

“We’re fond of ASU,” Carr explains, “and our business ventures have been born out of technologies steeped in financial economics work. A visiting scholars program has real merit because it brings top-tier faculty from other universities here. They get exposure to the Tempe campus and what’s happening in the Finance Department. At the same time, faculty and students get a chance to learn from academic researchers who are leading the way in financial economics knowledge creation.”

To learn more the Carr and Stephanie Bettis Distinguished Scholar Award Program, see page 4 of the 2007-2008 issue of Finance Forum.

Current Scholars

This year’s Bettis Scholars are Professors Philip E. Strahan  (top right) of Boston College and Richard C. Green (bottom right) of Carnegie Mellon University.

Strahan, the John L. Collins S.J. Chair in Finance at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, is a Sloan Fellow at the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and previously spent seven years in the Research and Market Analysis Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1993. Strahan visited ASU this February, when he presented a paper he co-authored with Elena Loutskina of the University of Virginia. The work asserts that inadequate information production was a factor in the 2001-2008 real estate bubble and crash.

Green, the Richard M. and Margaret S. Cyert Professor of Economics and Management at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University, is a former director of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a former president of both the American Finance and Western Finance Associations. In April at ASU Green presented a paper titled, "Information Spillovers and Performance Persistence in Private Equity Partnerships," which he co-authored with Vincent Globe, also from Carnegie Mellon University. The work presents a simple model that rationalizes performance persistence in private equity partnerships.