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G. Geoffrey Booth

G. Geoffrey Booth

Title(s)

Frederick S. Addy Distinguished Chair in Finance
Finance

Contact Information

331 Eppley Center
(517) 884-2986

Interests

Domestic and international financial markets; risk and risk management; and investments

Degree

PhD University of Michigan

Bio

Dr. Geoffrey Booth could be said to be an accidental internationalist. Dr. Booth, the Michigan State University Frederick S. Addy Distinguished Chair in Finance and Acting Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Research, didn’t even go abroad until he was much older when he taught for a summer at the University of Hamburg. The experience, he says now, “was such a cultural shock to me. It totally changed by life.” Until he visited Germany, his only internationally-themed work had been on exchange rates; international markets were still very highly regulated. His time in Hamburg led to work on German financial markets and connections with Finnish colleagues at conferences where he presented his work on Finnish financial markets.

Today, virtually all of Dr. Booth’s research has an international bent. As he explains it, in the field of finance there are two types of international work: 1) purely international, focusing on areas such as trade, capital flows, and exchange rates among countries, and 2) comparative research. His most recent project, “Financial Networks and Trading in Emerging Bond Markets,” is a hybrid of the two. The paper, which Dr. Booth co-authored with Umit Gurun, a former doctoral student who graduated in 2004, and Harold Zhang, examines the role of financial networks in influencing asset prices and trading performances.

Focusing on Turkey, the researchers set out to determine if foreign banks typically achieve better trading performance than their domestic counterparts. The answer, it seems, is not related to the country of origin but rather to the presence of global information networks in multinational banks. The heightened efficiency of these banks (foreign and domestic) to acquire and process information via their own information channels results in more favorable transaction prices and better performance.

The findings of this research highlight Dr. Booth’s belief that finance is a global field. In fact, he goes as far as to say that finance programs should not have a specific course in international finance – every course should be international. Similarly, he would advise a student interested in finance to pursue a broad liberal education in addition to the mathematics, economics, accounting, and finance coursework that is the bedrock of the discipline. “Our market is a global market. You’re going to be talking with educated people throughout the world. You need to be able to know where people are coming from,“ he said.

Dr. Booth has helped with the internationalization of The Eli Broad College of Business and been involved with the Weekend MBA study abroad program. He believes that the international experience provided by this program is invaluable because the students learn something they cannot learn in the classroom. His first trip with the Weekend MBA students was to Finland and Russia. “It’s amazing how study abroad opens up people’s eyes. These were students with an average age in their 30s and they couldn’t believe that places like Finland existed,” he said. In later years, he escorted the MBA groups back to Finland, Sweden, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, often choosing countries and cities that he had personally never visited to broaden his own horizons in addition to those of the students.

The doctoral students he has supervised demonstrate another way in which finance is an increasingly global field. Although finance is a decidedly American field, with the paradigms of finance coming out of this country, only 3 of the 18 students Dr. Booth has supervised have been American. Over twice that number have been Turkish, leading to his initial interest in Turkey. “Finance today is a very international discipline. Almost no group is underrepresented,” he said.

Dr. Booth received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1971 and joined MSU Eli Broad College of Business and Graduate School of Management faculty in 1998. Before arriving at MSU, Dr. Booth was a tenured faculty member at the University of Rhode Island, Syracuse University and, most recently, Louisiana State University. He has also served as a guest professor at the University of Hamburg, in Germany and as a docent at the University of Vaasa, in Finland.

He is an active researcher, having published more than 150 journal articles, monographs and professional papers. His current research focuses on the behavior of financial markets with a special emphasis on market microstructure issues. Booth serves on several journal editorial boards and his currently the editor the Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions & Money. He has been the president of the Multinational Finance Association and the Eastern Finance Association.

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G. Geoffrey Booth is a Professor of Finance where he holds the Frederick S. Addy Distinguished Chair in Finance. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1971 and joined MSU in 1998. Before coming to the Broad School, Booth taught at the University of Rhode Island, Syracuse University and, most recently, Louisiana State University. He is an active researcher, having published more than 100 journal articles, monographs, and professional papers. Booth serves on several journal editorial boards and has been the president of the Multinational Finance Association and the Eastern Finance Association.

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