June 10, 2004
Speaker Biographies
Paul B. Bennett is senior vice president and chief economist of the New York Stock Exchange. Since he joined the Exchange in June 2001, he has headed the Research Department. He is responsible for developing and carrying out basic research into the structure of equity markets, and providing analytic support within the exchange for its various business and public-policy activities. Before joining the NYSE, Mr. Bennett was a senior officer and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he had worked since 1978. At the Fed, he headed the Capital Markets Research Division, was editor of the bank's research journal and, before that, vice president for Fedwire Funds and Securities Transfers, among other responsibilities. Mr. Bennett has published numerous papers on finance, economics, and securities markets in both academic and practitioner journals.
Lawrence Harris is the chief economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He serves on assignment from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California where he holds the Fred V. Keenan Chair in Finance. His previous assignments include a year spent at the New York Stock Exchange and a year spent at the SEC. He is an expert in market microstructure and investment management, has written extensively about trading rules, price volatility, index markets, and market regulation and has consulted to traders, exchanges, investment banks, and regulators. Mr. Harris has been an associate editor of the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative and Analysis and has served on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal.
Frank M. Hatheway is chief economist at the Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. and is responsible for a variety of projects and initiatives to support the Nasdaq market and improve its market structure. Before joining Nasdaq, Mr. Hatheway was a professor of finance at Penn State University and a well-known researcher in market microstructure. He has authored academic articles in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Intermediation, and other leading finance journals. He has served as an economic fellow and senior research scholar with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He has also served on the Economic Advisory Boards of NASD and the Nasdaq Stock Market. Mr. Hatheway is a chartered financial analyst.
Kenneth M. Lehn is the Samuel A. McCullough Professor of Finance in the Katz School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches courses on business valuation and corporate restructuring. He also is a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. Mr. Lehn joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1991, after serving as chief economist at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for four years. He also has taught at Washington University, the University of California-Los Angeles, Miami University, and the Georgetown University Law Center. In addition, he has written on topics relating to the economics of professional sports. Mr. Lehn has published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Law and Economics. He also has published pieces in the Wall Street Journal and is a founding editor of the Journal of Corporate Finance.
Sukesh Patro is a doctoral student at the Joseph M. Katz School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests lie in the area of corporate governance, executive compensation, and mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Patro's current research includes the determinants of corporate boards from 1935 to 2000, changes in boards associated with banking mergers, and changes in the governance of firms following corporate spin-offs. Before joining the doctoral program at the University of Pittsburgh, Mr. Patro worked for five years in the banking industry in India, including a three-year stint on the government bond trading desk at ABN AMRO Bank.
Michael Plunkett is president for North America of Instinet, LLC, the global electronic agency securities broker, with more than 1,000 institutional investor customers in the United States and approximately 720 customers in Europe and Asia. Since being appointed to the position in 2003, Mr. Plunkett has been responsible for the strategic direction of the institutional brokerage business in the United States and Canada. He also oversees all related brokerage operations, sales trading, technology, and customer relations. Mr. Plunkett has been working in equities for eighteen years and has been responsible for the management of some of the most high-level accounts at Instinet since joining the company twelve years ago as a sales trader. Throughout his tenure at Instinet, he has held various positions ranging from a manager in hedge fund and institutional equities to cohead of the Lynch, Jones & Ryan desk. Before joining Instinet, Mr. Plunkett held a senior trader position at Boston Securities.
Kuldeep Shastri holds the Roger Ahlbrandt Sr. Endowed Chair in Finance and is professor of business administration at University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business. Mr. Shastri teaches and conducts research in the areas of corporate finance, derivatives, financial engineering, and market microstructure. In addition to teaching at the Katz School, He has lectured extensively in Central and Eastern Europe, South America, and South-East Asia and has held visiting positions at the Czech Management Center in Prague, the International Management Center in Budapest, Thammasat University in Bangkok, and Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria in Guayaquil. Mr. Shastri has published over forty articles in a variety of finance journals and made over sixty presentations at national and international conferences. He is a coauthor with Thomas Copeland and J. Fred Weston of a textbook titled Financial Theory and Corporate Policy published by Addison-Wesley. Mr. Shastri is currently an academic director of the Financial Management Association International, a director of the Pittsburgh chapter of Financial Executives International, and was a past president and chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Eastern Finance Association.
Benn Steil is the André Meyer Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is also the editor of International Finance; a cofounder and director of Efficient Frontiers Ltd, a markets consultancy; a nonexecutive director of the virt-x stock exchange in London; a member of the European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee; and a member of the Advisory Board of the European Capital Markets Institute. Until November 1998, he was director of the International Economics Program at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Before his appointment at the institute in 1992, he held a Lloyd's of London Tercentenary Research Fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford. Mr. Steil has written and spoken widely on securities trading and market regulation. His research and market commentary are regularly covered in publications such as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and International Herald Tribune. Among his books are The European Equity Markets and Institutional Investors.
Peter J. Wallison joined AEI in 1999 as a resident fellow and as the codirector of AEI's program on financial market deregulation. As a partner of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, he practiced banking, corporate, and financial law in the firm's Washington and New York offices. As the general counsel of the U.S. Treasury Department from 1981 to 1985, Mr. Wallison helped develop the Reagan administration's proposals for deregulating the financial services industry. During 1986 and 1987, Mr. Wallison was counsel to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Back from the Brink, a proposal for a system of private deposit insurance; coauthor of Nationalizing Mortgage Risk: The Growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and The GAAP Gap: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of the Internet; and the editor of Serving Two Masters Yet out of Control: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Optional Federal Chartering of Insurance Companies, all of which have been published by the AEI Press. More recently, Mr. Wallison is the author of Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency, published in December 2002 by Westview Press.
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