The AFA announced the selection of G. William Schwert as a member of the AFA Society of Fellows at the annual meeting in Atlanta. Bill Schwert is a Distinguished University Professor of Finance and Statistics at the University of Rochester’s William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration. He received his A.B. with honors in economics from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in 1971, his M.B.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1975 both from the University of Chicago.
Bill has been one of the Editors of the Journal of Financial Economics since 1979 and the Managing Editor of the JFE since 1996. He has been a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1988. In 1982, Bill was the first Center for Research in Security Prices Distinguished Research Scholar at the University of Chicago. His paper “Why Does Stock Market Volatility Change Over Time?” won a Smith-Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize from the Journal of Finance in 1990 and his paper “Stock Market Volatility” won the Graham and Dodd Plaque from the Financial Analysts Journal in 1990.
Bill’s research has covered broad areas of economics, finance and statistics, including:
- the relations among interest rates, inflation rates and asset returns;
- the effects of stock market volatility on asset returns;
- the effects of government regulation on business;
- the market for corporate control;
- the behavior of the IPO market and
- the use of modern time series techniques to analyze economic and financial data.