Staff Directory

Ricardo Lombera is the Program Administrator for the Program in Law and Economics of Capital Markets.

Ricardo Lombera graduated cum laude from Connecticut College in 2022 with a bachelor's degree in Government and Sociology. While at Connecticut College, Ricardo focused his studies on the intersection of immigration and economics. During this period, he worked with the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the Human Rights Watch.

Ricardo is a member of the Class of 2026 at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University.

Matthew Spiegel's research ranges widely with publications in the areas of market microstructure, asset pricing, real estate, corporate finance, and experimental economics. His theoretical work has helped to explain stock market volatility, what factors lead to market breakdowns and how mergers within an industry impact the new firm’s competitors over time. His empirical work has included the development of statistical methods that can estimate the impact of local characteristics on housing returns and for identifying when and if a particular mutual fund will generate above market returns. These articles have won the ANBAR Management Intelligence Citation of Excellence, the Michael Brennan Best Paper Award and the Ross Best Paper Award.  In 2015 his overall body of work was recognized with Eastern Finance Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award.  
 
Matthew Spiegel is  the former president and prior to that vice president of  the Society for Financial Studies. He was the Society's advisory chair for its annual Finance Cavalcade conference from 2011 to 2017 and is the advisory chair for the first Asia-Pacific Finance Cavalcade conference in 2017. He was the executive editor of the Review of Financial Studies from 2005 to 2011. Prior to joining Yale University Professor Spiegel held academic posts at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley and before that Columbia University. He is a former co-editor and founder of the Journal of Financial Markets, a former associate editor of the Review of Financial Studies, and a past member of the Nasdaq Economic Advisory Board.

Mao Ye is a Professor of Finance at Cornell University. His research focuses on market microstructure, machine learning, and big data. His research has been published in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. Ye is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He delivered the keynote speech on “Big Data in Finance” at the 41st Annual NBER Summer Institute. In October 2018, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Ye a grant to jumpstart a big data initiative at the NBER, under which he will organize six NBER conferences, inviting leading academics, policymakers, and practitioners to discuss the future of big data research in finance.

Mao Ye earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2011. While he was a student at Cornell, he was elected as a trustee member of Cornell’s Board of Trustees, marking the first time an Ivy League institution had elected a trustee from Mainland China. In 2018, the New York Historical Museum and Library selected Ye as a contributor to “Journeys: An American Story,” a book of essays about immigration and American greatness. In 2016, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign named him the Educator of the Year. In 2019, Ye was selected as the university commencement speaker at Renmin University of China.

Suresh Sundaresan is the Chase Manhattan Bank Professor of Economics and Finance at Columbia University. He has published in the areas of Treasury auctions, bidding, default risk, habit formation, term structure of interest rates, asset pricing, investment theory, pension asset allocation, swaps, options, forwards, futures, fixed-income securities markets and risk management. His research papers have appeared in major journals such as the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Business, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, European Economic Review, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Political Economy, etc. He has also contributed articles in Financial Times, and World Bank Conferences. He is an associate editor of Journal of Finance and Review of Derivatives Research. His current research focus is on default risk and how its affects asset pricing and sovereign debt securities. He has worked as a senior strategist at Lehman Brothers in their Fixed Income Division during 1986-1987. He has consulted full time for Morgan Stanley Asset Management during 2000-2001. His consulting work focuses on term structure models, swap pricing models, credit risk models, valuation, and risk management. He has conducted training programs for leading investment banks including, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, CSFB and Lehman Brothers. He is the author of the text Fixed-Income Markets and Their Derivatives. He has served on the Treasury Bond Markets Advisory Committee. He was the resident scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during 2006.

Sundaresan has testified before the United States Congress on the transparency of Corporate Bond Markets. His current research work focuses on corporate bankruptcy, design of bankruptcy code, the role of collateral in interest rate swaps, and the role of central bank in providing liquidity to private capital markets. More recently, he has been working on micro-lending with a view to characterizing defaults, recovery rates, and interest rates in micro-loans. The research attempts to characterize the efforts that are needed to lower the borrowing rates. Another ongoing project explores whether the duration of the borrowing relationship has led to an improvement of borrower's welfare. At Columbia University, he is responsible for teaching two MBA elective courses: Debt Markets, and Advanced Derivatives. He has trained MBA and PhD students, who currently serve on the faculty at universities in the United States and abroad as well as in senior positions in major investment banks around the world.

Justin McCrary is the Paul J. Evanson Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. An economist by training, he is an empirical scholar who has published extensively on policing, crime, securities, antitrust, econometrics and statistics, and empirical methods in law.

McCrary is the founding director of the Social Sciences Data Laboratory, or “D-Lab,” at the University of California, Berkeley. He established D-Lab as the university’s center for innovation in training graduate students regarding quantitative social science generally and emerging “big data” techniques specifically.  D-Lab also is the repository for several large-scale data collections, including confidential collections associated with the Census Research Data Centers.

From 2008 to 2018, McCrary was a member of the faculty at Berkeley Law School where he taught courses such as Business Associations; Litigation and Statistics; the Law and Economics of Discrimination; Quantitative Methods; and Race, Policing and Data Science. In 2011, the University of Chicago Press published his book, Controlling Crime: Strategies and Tradeoffs (co-edited with Phil Cook and Jens Ludwig).

Before teaching at Berkeley, McCrary was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and an assistant professor in the university’s economics department. He is also a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he co-directs the Crime Working Group. He has received grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Arnold Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.

Joshua Mitts writes and teaches on securities law and financial contracting.  His recent projects study pseudonymous short attacks on public companies, informed trading on cybersecurity data breaches, information leakage and hedge-fund activism, insider trading on corporate disclosures, information transmission in financial markets, and whether consumers keep promises they make themselves.

For more information on Joshua Mitts's research and teaching, please see his personal website.

Bio

Dr. Jeffrey H. Harris is currently the Gary D. Cohn Goldman Sachs Chair in Finance at Kogod. Dr. Harris has an extensive background in market microstructure and regulatory issues. Dr. Harris recently served as Chief Economist and Division Director for the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Previously he served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and as Visiting Academic at the Nasdaq Stock Market. He has previously held faculty appointments as the Dean’s Chair in Finance at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, as the Collins Chair of Finance in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University (visiting), at the University of Delaware, at the University of Notre Dame and at The Ohio State University. His research appears in the Energy Journal, European Financial Management, Financial Management, The Financial Review, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Investment Management, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Futures Markets, the Review of Futures Markets and the Review of Financial Studies.

Professor Hillary A. Sale is an award-winning teacher, a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law, and an Affiliated Faculty Member at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. She teaches courses on Leadership, Women and Leadership, and Corporate Law and Governance. In the spring of 2017, she was the Sullivan & Cromwell Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she taught Women’s Leadership and Corporate Boards and Governance.

She is an expert on and frequent speaker to industry groups and academic audiences about leadership and corporate governance and was selected by the St. Louis Business Journal as a “2014 Most Influential Business Women.” In addition to running leadership and other programs in industry, Professor Sale has taught in multiple executive education programs, including the Harvard Law School Law Firm Leaders Program and various programs through the Washington University Olin School of Business.

Professor Sale is a member of the FINRA Board of Governors, where she serves on the Nominating and Governance, Compensation, and Regulatory Operations Committees. She is also a member of the Advisory Board of Foundation Press, and the Advisory Board of DirectWomen, a nonprofit with the mission of increasing the presence of women on public company boards. She is Chair of the DirectWomen Board Institute and also works in industry training executives on leadership, governance, and risk management.

Professor Sale is a leading scholar in the areas of corporate governance and the role of corporate and securities law in shaping board decision-making and strategies and has authored many award-winning articles. Professor Sale is co-author (with John C. Coffee, Jr. and Charles K. Whitehead) of the book Securities Regulation and is a member of the Committee on Corporate Laws of the ABA, where she co-chaired the task force for the Sixth Edition of the Corporate Director’s Guidebook. Professor Sale is also a Fellow of the American College of Governance Counsel.

Before entering academia, Sale was a law clerk to The Honorable Richard S. Arnold, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, practiced with the law firm of WilmerHale LLP, and was Chief of Staff and Director of Operations for Evelyn F. Murphy, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1993 and holds a master’s degree in Economics from Boston University, where she also completed her B.A., summa cum laude in 1983. From 1997-2009, she was a member of the University of Iowa College of Law, where she was the F. Arnold Daum Chair in Corporate Finance and Law, and from 2009-2018, she was the Walter D. Coles Professor of Law and a Professor of Management at Washington University in St. Louis.

Eric Talley is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Co-Director, Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership. He is an expert in the intersection of corporate law, governance, and finance, and he teaches/researches in areas that include corporate law and finance, mergers and acquisitions, quantitative methods, machine learning, contract and commercial law, game theory, and economic analysis of law.  Talley has held permanent or visiting appointments at the University of California at Berkeley, University of Southern California, Caltech, University of Chicago; Harvard University; Georgetown University, RAND Graduate School, and Stanford University. He has also taught short courses at UC Berkeley; the University of Miami; University of San Diego (London Program); University of Sydney (Australia); University of New South Wales (Australia); Tel Aviv University (Israel), the Interdisciplinary Center (Israel); ETH Zurich (Switzerland); and the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). In 2017, Talley was chosen by Columbia Law School's graduating class to receive the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching.