To be Announced

To be Announced

The Dark Side of ETFs and Index Funds

Do popular investment products such as passive ETFs and index funds benefit individual investors? Using data from one of the largest brokerages in Germany, we find that individual investors worsen their portfolio performance after using these products compared with non-users.  As these securities make market timing easier, we investigate whether this decrease in users' portfolio performance is primarily due to bad market timing.  Our answer is yes.

Talk to FPM Students  @ 4.30 on "How to Develop a Research Philosophy"

Brief description - All successful careers in research involve the quest for answers to a particular question.  The question and its answers defines the research philosophy of the researcher.  It is his brand.  Using personal examples, this talk by Prof. Bhattacharya will teach you how to start branding yourself from the time you join as a Ph.D. student.  He has been invited to give this talk to many Ph.D. students in many countries.

Media Coverage: http://poetsandquants.com/2012/10/22/worlds-best-b-school-professors-utpal-bhattacharya/

Utpal Bhattacharya, Associate Professor of Finance, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, Bloomington.  Professor Bhattacharya received his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1980; an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, in 1982; and his Ph.D. in Finance from Columbia University in 1990. He joined Indiana University in 1997. Professor Bhattacharya's research is on the dark side of finance.  He has published in all the top-tier finance journals, and many of the top-tier accounting and economics journals.  His research has been featured more than hundred times in the U.S. media and in the foreign media (including four feature stories in the Economist.)  He has been invited to present his research in more than 140 institutions in 24 countries in 5 continents.  He wrote a report for and served as a member of the "Task Force to Modernize Securities Regulation in Canada" in 2006. He and his report were featured in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigative story titled "Who Is Guarding Your Money." Legislators in Ontario, Canada, discussed this report.  On October 2012, on the basis of the findings of his Journal of Finance paper that documents cross-subsidies in mutual fund families, he opted to become a "whistleblower" against the industry.

Professor Bhattacharya is also an excellent teacher.  He was awarded the Trustee Teaching Award by Indiana University twice.  He teaches in a different country every summer.  He has taught at top universities in Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Russia, Taiwan and Turkey.  In the U.S., he has been a visiting faculty at Chicago, Duke and MIT.  His goal is to spread the gospel of honest finance to every corner of the globe.

More info on the speaker at:

Homepage: http://www.kelley.iu.edu/ubhattac/

Research Papers: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1333

Google Scholar:http://http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=s899WjYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

YouTube:http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXtR2UfFoNI

"CEO-Director Connections and Fraud" and "Venture Capital Communities"

We study the relation between fraud and social ties between CEOs and directors. While the sum of all types of social ties decreases fraud probability, this result masks heterogeneity in the effect of different types of ties. Nonprofessional ties from common alma mater or non-business service increase fraud likelihood. Professional ties from prior employment histories lower fraud probability, especially when the ties are formed when serving as executives rather than as directors or director and executive. The results are robust to conventional controls, industry, new controls based on biographic data, and director fixed effects. While independence matters, our results suggest that variation within independence directors is at least as important.

We analyze the ties formed by venture capital (VC) firms through co-syndications to better understand the composition of VC syndicates. We show that while VCs can have several syndicate partners, they exhibit strong preference for some partners over others, leading to spatial agglomerates. These "communities" are soft border conglomerates whose members are probabilistically more likely to interact within than outside. We characterize the number, identity, composition, and stability of communities. The results are consistent with learning-by-doing models in which familiar partners aid learning, or with incomplete contracting models where familiarity mitigates hold up and free riding by facilitating trust and reciprocity.

Dr N.R. Prabhala has a PhD from Stern School of Business, New York University. His research interest includes corporate finance, Financial Econometrics and option markets. Prabhala has written on a range of topics in corporate finance, including econometric techniques and signaling models in event-studies, executive compensation, and IPOs. His work on options examines the efficiency of the index option market, and the effect of the 1987 stock market crash on the information content of option prices. Prabhala's work has been published in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. He has served as an associate editor of Review of Financial Studies.He has an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and Btech from IIT Delhi.