Retiring Faculty

J. Anthony Cookson

Professor J. Anthony Cookson joins Smeal this year after serving 13 years at University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business, most recently as the Klump Professor of Finance. Before then, he completed his PhD in economics at University of Chicago (2013) after completing his undergraduate and master's studies at Montana State University in his home state.

Professor Cookson's research covers a wide range of topics in finance and economics. His research makes use of unique data sets and empirical settings to study how households and corporations make financial decisions. Through his research, Professor Cookson has become an expert on how investors use social media, the casino industry, the political economy of Native American reservations, and the consequences of the fracking revolution for households. His research has been published in leading peer reviewed journals, including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, and Management Science.

Professor Cookson is an editor at the Review of Corporate Finance Studies, as well as an associate editor at the Journal of Financial Economics and Management Science. Since 2022, he has been a director of the Financial Research Association, which organizes a prominent academic finance research conference in Las Vegas annually.

Beyond his involvement in the FRA, Professor Cookson is passionate about junior faculty development, participating as a faculty member in the Junior Faculty Mentoring Program while serving on its board. He also founded and ran Finance in the Cloud, a 5-conference online conference series devoted exclusively to featuring junior faculty research in the early stages of the Covid-19 Pandemic.