Russell Wermers

Russ Wermers is Paul J. Cinquegrana '63 Endowed Chair in Finance and Director of the Center for Financial Policy (CFP) at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland at College Park, where he won a campus-wide teaching award during 2005 and a Krowe Teaching Award (within the Smith Business School) during 2013. As Director, Professor Wermers guides the CFP in its mission of generating research that informs financial policy in the private and public sectors. His main research interests include studies of the efficiency of securities markets, as well as the role of institutional investors in setting stock prices. In addition, he studies and teaches quantitative equity strategies. Most notably, his past research has developed new approaches to measuring and attributing the performance of mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds, which, among other applications, can be used to identify superior active funds. Professor Wermers also studies the investment behavior of these asset managers, as well as the impact of their trades on financial markets. His papers have been published in leading scholarly journals, such as The American Economic Review and The Journal of Finance. His article on mutual fund “herding” and stock prices (Journal of Finance, 1999) won the NYSE Award for the Best Paper on Equity Trading in 1995. His coauthored article on mutual fund performance was a finalist for the Smith-Breeden Award for the Best Paper in the Journal of Finance during 2006/2007. His coauthored article on the use of FOIA requests by hedge funds to buy pharmaceutical stocks won the 2nd Place "Paper of the Year" Award from the Review of Financial Studies in 2017. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in December 1995.