Young Finance Scholars Consortium

Michelle Lowry is an editor of the Review of Corporate Finance Studies, and past associate editor of both the Journal of Financial Economics and the Review of Financial Studies. She has served as President of the Financial Management Association (FMA), a director of the American Finance Association (AFA) ,and a director of the European Finance Association (EFA). She co-founded AFFECT (Academic Female Finance Committee), which strives for gender equality among the field of finance academics, and she founded the AFFECT mentoring program. Currently, she serves as a member of the AFFECT advisory board. She won the Denis Gromb Award for outstanding citizenship in financial economics, in recognition for the founding of AFFECT.

Her research focuses on a variety of issues in empirical corporate finance, including initial public offerings, corporate governance, shareholder voting, environmental and social issues, regulation, lobbying, and mergers. She is particularly interested in the ways that companies’ corporate governance affects their performance around corporate events. Her research also relates to the effects of policy on firm outcomes, in particular regulation related to firm governance and shareholder voting. In this vein, she participated in an SEC panel on shareholder voting. Her research has been published in top finance journals, including the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Finance. She is the winner of the 2021 Jensen Prize, for Best Paper published in The Journal of Financial Economics in the areas of Corporate Finance and Organization, and winner of the 2025 Brattle prize (Distinguished paper) for paper published in The Journal of Finance in the area of Corporate Finance. Her research has attracted attention in the popular press, with cites in the Wall Street Journal, NPR’s Marketplace, Forbes, and the Economist.