Finance Research
Research in the Department of Finance
The Department of Finance stands at the forefront of research that assesses how institutions and markets adapt to technology, innovation and policy changes. Its studies are distinguished by the use of novel datasets, emerging AI technologies and policy relevance—both in the United States and around the world.
Faculty and student scholarship flourishes thanks to the department’s data-driven culture. Their work informs policy, reflecting GW’s location in the nation’s capital, the home of the financial markets’ regulatory authorities. This institutionally grounded research expands our understanding of investor beliefs; stock, bond and derivatives markets; fintech innovations; trading strategies; and the composition of corporate boards.
Research Centers and Institutes
Faculty in the Department of Finance teach courses in the GW Investment Institute, where students gain knowledge about the stock market and investing by serving as analysts and portfolio managers of some $9 million in university endowment funds.
Finance Department professors are also involved in teaching and research in the school’s Center for Real Estate Studies, a hub for Influential research focusing on affordable housing development and policy, mortgage equity and housing finance policy.
Research here isn’t for research’s sake. Like everything we do, our goal is to use it to transform policy and subsequently have an impact on people’s lives. For example, one of my challenges was to discover why the U.S. housing market collapsed and what could be done to prevent it from happening again. This was the perfect setting to do that work.
Robert Van Order, PhD
Oliver T. Carr Professor of Real Estate; Professor of Finance
Research Highlights
Department of Finance faculty are among the most-cited scholars in their field, having published in top industry journals including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and more. They are revered for work that breaks through the opaqueness of the bond market or examines how news media and social media affect equity risk and returns. They are also advancing understanding of credit risk in supply chain finance.
Explore how our faculty are advancing this work through impactful research across a range of industries and applications:
Gergana Jostova’s research explores how social media, investor behavior and trading frictions contribute to predictable patterns in risk and returns in stocks and bonds; the work sheds light on why profitable trading strategies persist in financial markets. Her recent work develops methods that help corporate bond investors make better trading decisions when faced with significant data uncertainty.
Chair, Department of Finance
Associate Professor of Finance
Short-selling can be controversial. It draws the attention of Wall Street, regulators, and the press, yet little research has been done on the agent lenders from whom short-sellers borrow their shares. The work of Brian Henderson (in collaboration with Jostova) exposes the active role of securities lenders in determining the cost of short selling. Henderson also examines how financial innovations affect outcomes, including investor returns, in the context of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and structured products.
Vineet Bhagwat studies the way people, institutions and new technologies shape financial decision-making and innovation. His research ranges from how early-life experiences influence executives’ risk-taking to how diversity in the boardroom impacts corporate innovation and strategic outcomes. His more recent work uses AI and large language models to measure investor beliefs, sentiment and disagreement from unstructured text, revamping our understanding of how markets process information. His work connects corporate finance, innovation and cutting-edge machine learning to answer business and industries’ most pressing questions.
Associate Professor of Finance
Assistant Professor of Finance
The intersection of asset pricing and investor behavior is a research focus of Chukwuma Dim. He studies the way information disseminated through traditional news media, social media and options markets shapes investor beliefs, trading behavior and market outcomes. Using large-scale data, AI and natural language processing methods, Dim quantifies macro-finance variables from unstructured data to examine how investors form and maintain beliefs. He also analyzes how information is incorporated into asset prices.
Şenay Ağca examines how government policy, political engagement and financial market conditions shape corporate financing, investment and risk. Much of her work unfolds at the intersection of macro-finance, political economy and decision sciences. There, she studies how regulation, lobbying and macroeconomic shocks influence firms’ access to capital, credit risk and supply chains. Her work builds on her experience as a National Science Foundation Economics program director and her involvement in interdisciplinary initiatives, such as the bioeconomy, future manufacturing and the data revolution. She brings an interdisciplinary perspective to research that connects finance, public policy and operations.
Professor of Finance and Decision Sciences
Oliver Carr Chair in Real Estate; Professor of Finance & Economics
For five decades, Robert Van Order’s housing research has shaped understanding of mortgage markets, securitization and government-backed mortgage institutions. Van Order is the recipient of the 2026 Quigley Medal for Advancing Real Estate and Urban Economics, a lifetime achievement honor from the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.