For the second time in six months, a professor in the finance area in The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) School of Management won a “best paper” award from a prestigious finance journal.

Dr. Theodore E. Day

Dr. Theodore E. Day

Prof. Theodore E. Day A paper co-authored by Dr. Theodore E. Day, area coordinator for finance and managerial economics and a professor in UTD’s School of Management, this month won the “Fama/DFA Prize” as the best paper on capital markets and asset pricing published in the Jounal of Financial Economics during 2001. The award is named in honor of Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago, one of the “intellectual fathers” of modern research in finance during the mid-1960s who remains an active researcher to this day.

The paper, “Following the Leader: A Study of Individual Analysts’ Earnings Forecasts,” was co-authored by Rick A. Cooper of Harris Investment Management Company, Chicago, and Craig M. Lewis of the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The paper was published in the fall of 2001.

The prize-winning paper develops and tests procedures for ranking the performance of security analysts based on the timeliness of their earnings forecasts.

“The Journal of Financial Economics’ Fama/DFA Prize is a high honor and a tribute to the vision of Ted Day and his colleagues,” said Dr. Hasan Pirkul, dean of the UTD School of Management. “It is also an indication of the outstanding quality of scholars on the school’s faculty.”

Last January, one of Day’s colleagues, Dr. Yexiao Xu, associate professor of finance and managerial economics at UTD, and his co-authors won the prestigious Smith-Breeden Prize for having the best paper published in the Journal of Finance during 2001.

That paper, “Have Individual Stocks Become More Volatile? An Empirical Exploration of Idiosyncratic Risk,” has since been widely cited in the financial, business and general press.

Day and Xu are members of a faculty in the School of Management whose number of research citations, according to one index, rank it 14th in the nation among management schools, comparing favorably with faculties at such universities as The University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University and Ohio State University, all of which rank in the top 25.

Day holds a Ph.D. degree in Finance and an M.A. degree in Economics from Stanford University and an M.B.A. degree and a B.A. degree from the University of Oklahoma. He teaches graduate-level courses in financial management, investment management and advanced investment management.