All The New Faculty At The Top 25 Schools

There will be 12 new faces at the front of the class at Harvard Business School this fall.

Gregor Matvos won’t be teaching this year. But he is thrilled to be able to conduct research at the new home for the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, the Global Hub that opened in 2017.

Gregor Matvos. Courtesy photo

“The new home is spectacular,” says Matvos, who comes to Kellogg from the University of Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business, where he taught corporate finance; prior to that he was an associate professor at Chicago Booth. “I mean, the global hub is a tremendous building. The colleagues are friendly, but I’ve been around the block for a while now, so I know most of the people in the finance group at least, and some number of the economists here, too.

“So it’s been an easy transition, people have made it easy. The new dean‘s been here for now a couple of weeks, she seems to be very involved, it’s good. Yeah, it’s exciting time.”

Matvos’ research focuses on a few key categories: financial advisers, gender in finance, consumer arbitration, shadow banking, mortgages, and fintech. Currently serving as the associate editor of the Journal of Finance and the editor of Review of Corporate Finance Studies, his research on women in the financial adviser industry, in particular, has gotten a lot of external pickup.

Matvos, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, loves to be in the classroom, but he also appreciates the opportunity to step away, something the move to Kellogg has afforded him. “One of the benefits of moving is that you can offset the move with the transition costs by deferring some of the teaching,” he says. “Because I’m moving, and moving comes with a bunch of frictions, they’ve allowed me to opt out of the first year of teaching.”

But that’s not the only benefit of moving to Northwestern.

“There are many, many dimensions in which I think Northwestern is excellent,” Matvos tells P&Q. “One of them is very narrow: the colleagues are excellent. This group is both excellent from a research perspective as well as teaching perspective, and incredibly collegial. We have a very exciting young faculty, I would say. 

“Northwestern also has a bunch of resources dedicated to supporting faculty, which are, I would say, somewhat unique. Definitely there is a strong emphasis on faculty support so that we can focus on what we’re actually good at. I think that’s important in many ways. We teach our students that you should read and lean into your comparative advantage. We should probably follow some of what we teach, and I think Northwestern seems like it’s very good at that.”