Christa H.S. Bouwman, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance (2009 - 2010)
MIT Sloan School of Management
Christa Bouwman’s research interests are in corporate finance and financial intermediation. More specifically, she pursues research in the following five areas: bank liquidity creation and the role of bank capital; mergers and acquisitions; behavioral finance; executive compensation; and corporate governance. In the area of bank liquidity creation, she co-developed measures that can be used to assess how effective commercial banks are at achieving one of their prime objectives: creating liquidity. She studies how much liquidity banks create in the U.S. and around the world, the determinants of bank liquidity creation (particularly the role of bank capital and monetary policy, its effect on economic growth, and its behavior around financial crises. In the area of mergers and acquisitions, she analyzes the link between stock market valuation and merger quality, and the effect of bank monitoring on bank performance. In the area of behavioral finance, she examines how managerial overconfidence/optimism affects financial policies. In the area of executive compensation, she establishes that geography has a strong effect on CEO compensation in the sense that CEO compensation is affected by the compensation of geographically-close CEOs, even after controlling for the usual determinants of CEO compensation. In the area of corporate governance, she finds that director overlap leads to corporate governance similarity across firms.
Her research papers have been published in the Review of Financial Studies and the MIT / Sloan Management Review.
Bouwman will teach Advanced Corporate Finance at MIT's Sloan School of Management. She has taught Corporate Finance and Financial Modeling / Valuation at Case Western Reserve University, the University of Michigan, and at the University of Amsterdam – The Netherlands. She has been nominated for several undergraduate and MBA Excellence in Teaching awards.
Her professional experience includes five years in Corporate Finance at ABN AMRO Bank, in the areas of Venture Capital, Project Finance Advisory, and Capital Structure Advisory. She was a litigative consultant for the U.S. Department of Justice, assisting an expert witness in several cases related to the Savings & Loan crisis in the early 1980s. She is a regular visitor at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington D.C. and a Fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Bouwman is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and an Assistant Professor of Banking and Finance at Case Western Reserve University (on leave), where she held the Lewis-Progressive Chair the past three years. She holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Michigan, a Master’s degree in Economics and Business (cum laude) from the University of Groningen – the Netherlands, and an MBA from Cornell University.
