The Baylor Finance department will welcome Alex Butler, a Rice University professor of finance, to campus Friday. Butler will give a lecture as part of an ongoing series of research seminars put on by the department.
The seminar will take place at 11 a.m. Friday at 302 Paul L. Foster Campus for Business and Innovation.
Butler has performed extensive research on how the local community is affected when a firm goes public. At the seminar, he will discuss his findings on whether or not the recognition of the company going public has a beneficial effect on the community and local economy.
While this is a great opportunity for faculty in the department of finance to stay informed, students who are interested in the topic that is being covered will also benefit from going, said John Martin, Carr P. Collins Chair of Finance. The event is open to anyone.
Martin is in charge of organizing the research seminar and started having these seminars at Baylor in 1998.
The seminars were started with the intent of keeping faculty members up-to-date in their discipline and aware of what is going on in their field.
Dr. Mike Stegemoller, the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate department chair and an associate professor, said he always attends the research seminars because he likes to learn about what is going on in his field.
Stegemoller described the seminar as an opportunity to have a conversation about some of the more important academic works that are going on in the field of finance.
“It’s a really good way to stay in touch with what people are working on,” Stegemoller said. “The speaker explains what he’s doing and the attendees give feedback.”
There are six to eight seminars every semester, and each time an individual presents on a different topic that he or she has researched.
“These seminars are a way that we inform ourselves and engage in discussion of things that are actively being researched by our colleagues,” Martin said.
The seminar will be a very interactive environment, Martin said. Attendees will be able to ask Butler questions throughout the presentation, rather than only in a designated question and answer session at the end.
