Karpoff receives prestigious award for research in corporate governance

Jonathan Karpoff, a professor of finance at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, has received this year’s Outstanding Contributions to Research in Corporate Governance award from the influential Drexel University Center for Corporate Governance.

The Drexel center provides expert guidance to corporate directors and other practitioners as they lead and advise boards and discharge their fiduciary obligations.

Karpoff is only the eighth recipient of the Outstanding Contributions award, which puts him in very good company.

“This award recognizes Jon’s tremendous contributions to corporate governance research and places him among a distinguished list of prior winners, many of whom have been mentioned as Nobel Prize contenders,” says Jarrad Harford, the Marion B. Ingersol Professor of Finance at Foster and chair of the Department of Finance and Business Economics.

The Outstanding Contributions to Research in Corporate Governance award is selected by the Drexel Center’s external fellows, a group of the nation’s leading scholars in the area of corporate governance that includes Harford, Karpoff and fellow Foster finance professor Paul Malatesta.

World-class scholar

Karpoff joined the Foster School faculty in 1983 and currently serves as the Washington Mutual Endowed Chair in Innovation.

His extensive research in corporate finance, governance, crime and punishment has earned numerous national awards.

Research on the cost to firms for cooking the books was recognized with the Best Paper Award at the University of Chicago’s CRSP Forum in 2006, the William F. Sharpe Award for Scholarship in Financial Research in 2009, and Emerald Management Review’s Citations of Excellence Award in 2012.

His study finding that short sellers expose corporate financial fraud earned another Best Paper Award at the CRSP Forum in 2008. His paper on why IPO firms have takeover defenses won Best Paper Awards at the 2012 Financial Management Association conference and the 2011 Financial Research Association Conference. His paper comparing successes of publicly versus privately funded arctic expeditions earned Karpoff the 2003 Griliches Prize in Empirical Economics. And his study showing that managers who aggressively manage earnings tend to get fired earned him the Best Paper Award at the George Mason University Conference on Corporate Governance and Fraud Prevention in 2009.

Karpoff has held appointments as the John M. Olin Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 1998 and the Visiting Alumni Professor of Finance at Emory University from 2000-2002.

At Foster, Karpoff has won a number of teaching awards as well, most recently the Robert M. Bowen Executive MBA Excellence in Teaching Award (2014, 2015), Global Executive MBA Excellence in Teaching award (2013), and the Technology Management MBA Excellence in Teaching award (2011).

Worldwide service

In 2005, Karpoff received the KPMG/Peat Marwick PhD Project-Finance Doctoral Students Association inaugural award for Outstanding Service, Leadership, and Commitment to the Finance Profession.

He currently serves as associate editor of six different scholarly publications: the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Finance and Quantitative Analysis, Management Science, Managerial and Decision Science, and the North American Journal of Economics and Finance.

Karpoff also is a member of the Financial Economists Roundtable, an international research fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation, and a trustee of the Financial Management Association International. He’s past member of the Searle Civil Justice Institute Task Force on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (2011-2014), past president of the Financial Management Association (2007-2008), former faculty director of the Financial Management Association (2002-2004), former advisory board member for the National Association of Corporate Directors (2006-2011), and former managing editor of the Journal of Finance and Quantitative Analysis (1989-2003).

At the Foster School, he directed the CFO Forum from 2004-2007 and the Environmental Management Program from 1991-1993.