William G. Christie
Frances Hampton Currey Professor of Management in Finance
Professor of Law
By studying the operations of the major financial markets in the mid-1990s, Bill Christie, along with Paul Schultz of Notre Dame University, concluded that Nasdaq market makers were implicitly colluding to maintain artificially high trading profits at the expense of investors. His research subsequently resulted in a sweeping reform of the NASDAQ market, the introduction of the SEC Order Handling Rules, and a $1.027 billion settlement against the defendants. Professor Christie was co-editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation from 1999 through June 2005 and was the executive editor of Financial Management from 2006 to 2011. He currently serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Financial Management Association International. He was Dean of the Owen Graduate School of Management from 2000 to 2004, and served as associate dean for faculty development at Owen from September 1999 to July 2000, and from August 2007 to October 2008. He received a Vanderbilt Chair of Teaching Excellence in 1996 and Owen’s James A. Webb Jr. Award for Excellence in Teaching on five occasions between 1994 and 2014. He is also a five-time recipient of the EMBA Teaching award and was ranked either first or second among faculty in each
Business Week ranking from 1992 through 2000. At Owen, he has taught Managerial Finance in the MBA and Executive MBA programs, as well as in the College.
Research Interests
Market microstructure, credit rating agencies and corporate finance
Representative Publications
- "Market Microstructure of the Pink Sheets," Journal of Banking and Finance 33 (7), 1326-1339 (2009) (with Nicholas Bollen)
- "Wall Street Scandals: The Curative Effects of Law and Finance," 84 Washington University Law Review 1567 (2006) (with Robert Thompson)
- "Do Firms Time Equity Offerings? Evidence from the 1930s and 1940s," Financial Management 33 (1), 5-23 (2004) (with Timothy Burch and Vikram Nanda)
- "Nasdaq Trading Halts: The Impact of Market Mechanisms on Prices, Trading Activity, and Execution Costs," Journal of Finance 57 (3), 1443-1478 (2002) (with Share Corwin and Jeff Harris)
- "The Initiation and Withdrawal of Odd-Eighth Quotes among Nasdaq Stocks: An Empirical Analysis," Journal of Financial Economics 52 (3), 409-442 (1999) (with Paul Schultz)
- "Effects of Market Reform on the Trading Costs and Depths of Nasdaq Stocks," Journal of Finance 54, 1-34 (1999) (with Michael Barclay, Jeffrey Harris, Eugene Kandel, and Paul Schultz)
- "Dealer Markets Under Stress: The Performance of Nasdaq Market Makers During the November 15, 1991 Market Break," Journal of Financial Services Research 13(3), 205-229 (1998) (with Paul Schultz)
- "Market Structure, Price Discovery, and the Intraday Pattern of Bid-Ask Spreads for Nasdaq Securities," Journal of Business 68, 35-60 (1995) (with K.C. Chan and Paul Schultz)
- "Why do Nasdaq Market Makers Avoid Odd-Eighth Quotes?," Journal of Finance 49, 1813-1840 (1994) (with Paul Schultz). Reprinted in Microstructure: The Organization of Trading and Short Term Price Behavior, for the series The International Library of Critical Writings In Financial Economics, 1998.
