Maureen O'Hara

Dr. O’Hara is an expert on issues related to market microstructure.

Her recent research looks at the how ETFs affect market stability, liquidity issues in corporate bond markets, and corporate governance problems in banks. She has consulted for a number of companies and organizations, including Facebook, Microsoft, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, the New York Stock Exchange, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, and the World Federation of Exchanges.

Dr. O’Hara is the Robert W. Purcell Professor of Finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University, and holds a Professorship at the University of Technology Sydney. She is the author of numerous journal articles as well as the classic book Market Microstructure Theory (Blackwell, 1995). She publishes widely on a broad range of topics including banking and financial intermediaries, law and finance, experimental economics, and finance and ethics, and recently published a book, Something for Nothing: Arbitrage and Ethics on Wall Street (Norton, 2016).

Dr. O’Hara has served as President of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Financial Management Association, the Society for Financial Studies, and the International Atlantic Economic Society. She was the executive editor of The Review of Financial Studies, and coeditor of The Review of Asset Pricing Studies. She also serves on the board of directors of NewStar Financial, a commercial finance company, and on the board of trustees of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA-CREF).

She spent more than a decade on the board of directors of Investment Technology Group, Inc. (ITG), a global agency brokerage firm, most recently serving as Chairman of the board. She is currently an advisor to Symbiont IO, a fintech company focused on distributed ledger technology. She was a member of the CFTC-SEC Emerging Regulatory Issues Task Force (the “flash crash” committee), the global advisory board of the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI), the advisory board of the Office of Financial Research, US Treasury, and she is currently serving on the SEC Equity Market Structure Advisory Board.