I’m a business school finance professor at the Boston College Carroll School of Management. I observe worldwide investing trends and write research papers on the cutting edge of investing, with a focus on asset managers, indexing and ETFs, ESG, and cryptocurrencies. I published one of the first papers on exchange-traded funds as a Princeton undergraduate in 2003, started writing about ESG investing when it was still called SRI, and wrote about crypto-coin offerings when Bitcoin was still trading under $5,000. My research and ideas have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Bloomberg, Fortune magazine, MarketWatch, Politico, Reuters, and other media outlets.
At the age of 6, in 1988, I moved to the United States with my family from the Soviet Union. My obsession with finance and investing began when I bought a few shares of the Berger One Hundred mutual fund at the age of 11. Soon after, I would start visiting the middle school library to read the Wall Street Journal and peruse the stock pages. I listened to business reports on my handheld radio (this was before we had cable or internet), read books of Peter Lynch and other famous investors, and drew graphs with the prices of various stocks and funds that I was investigating.
In high school, I was inspired by the M-squared measure (of Franco and Leah Modigliani) for performance evaluation to make my own measure – the LK Measure. I wrote a paper describing this new measure for the prestigious Intel (now Regeneron) Science Talent Search competition and was chosen as one of 300 semifinalists from across the country. I was high school valedictorian and entered Princeton in the fall of 1999.
At Princeton, I majored in economics with a focus on finance. I founded the Princeton Economics Forum to facilitate discussion and debate about major issues related to finance and economics. My junior paper, comparing exchange-traded funds to index mutual funds, was among the first to study this recently-introduced investment vehicle, and was almost immediately accepted and published at the Journal of Portfolio Management. My senior thesis examined how the return distributions of a variety of different hedge fund strategies were eerily similar to just selling out-of-the-money put options on the market, a theme that was later the subject of several published articles by top financial economists.
I stayed at Princeton for my doctoral studies, writing papers on the structure of the securities lending industry, on the brain drain of traditional investment managers to hedge funds, and on the role of political affiliation in mutual fund manager portfolio decisions. I defended my dissertation entitled Essays on the Economics of Money Management in May 2008 and received my PhD in Economics.
“Education Costs Money…But Then, So Does Ignorance”
Baron Claus Moser
I have taught finance at a business school since 2008, spending the first seven years of my career at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business, and the last six at the Boston College Carroll School of Management. Nearly 2,000 students have completed my classes, including undergraduate, MBA, and Masters in Science, from across the United States and around the world. My research on investment management and financial innovation has been published at the world’s most prestigious finance journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. My papers have received more than 2,000 citations from other scholars. I have reviewed more than one hundred academic papers for publication in top journals and have been invited to present and discuss papers at the world’s best finance conferences. My paper on initial coin offerings was one of the most highly-read academic papers, with more than 7,000 downloads. I have given interviews to (and my work has been cited by) all the best known business media sources.
Please follow me on Twitter @ProfessorLennyK
You can visit my Boston College website here.
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