Associate professor of finance Mark Leary has received first place in the prestigious Jensen Prizes for Corporate Finance and Organizations sponsored by The Journal of Financial Economics (JFE). Leary shares the prize with his coauthors, John R. Graham and Michael R. Roberts, for their financial research paper, “A century of capital structure: The leveraging of corporate America.” The paper was published in Volume 118, Issue 3, December 2015, Pages 658-683 of JFE.

The paper “sheds light on the evolution and determination of corporate financial policy by analyzing a unique, panel data set containing accounting and financial market information for US nonfinancial publicly traded firms over the last century.”

The Journal of Financial Economics or JFE is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering theoretical and empirical topics in financial economics. Together with the Journal of Finance and the Review of Financial Studies, it is considered to be among the top three finance journals.

The Jensen Prizes honor Michael C. Jensen, Founding Editor of The Journal of Financial Economics. His vision for the JFE as an outlet for timely, relevant, high quality scientific research in financial economics has been instrumental in its success.

Mark Leary

Professor Leary joined Olin in 2010. He taught previously at Cornell University and, prior to his academic career, worked for CVS Corp. and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Leary’s research investigates the motives behind corporate financial policy decisions, including leverage, security issuance, dividend and share repurchase decisions. His work has demonstrated the roles of adjustment costs, credit conditions, and peer firms in affecting financial policy.

Congratulations!