The Johnson School Annual Report 2007–2008 - Johnson Graduate ...

As a student at the Johnson
School, Gideon Saar, PhD ’00,
fell in love with Cornell and the
surrounding community. So
when he was invited to come
back to Ithaca to teach, Saar was
happy to accept.
“The Johnson School has a
unique environment,” he says.
“You have top researchers,
excellent students, and a
beautiful setting, which I love.
For me, that’s a winning combination.”
Saar, an associate professor of finance, is interested in
market microstructure and behavioral finance. “One of the
key characteristics of market microstructure research is
that we recognize that the actions of each investor are the
building blocks that create everything we observe: prices,
how stocks evolve, how much volatility there is, liquidity in
the market, informational efficiency—everything,” he says.
“My interest in behavioral finance stems from a similar
belief—that there are patterns in prices and trading that we
don’t fully understand when we look from a distance, and
one way to find out what’s behind those patterns is to observe
the behavior of particular groups of investors.”
“The Johnson School has a unique
environment: top researchers, excellent
students, and a beautiful setting. That’s a
winning combination.”
Saar spent a year as a visiting research economist for
the New York Stock Exchange, which provided ample
opportunity to observe players and trading mechanisms
there. “It also impressed on me the importance of
institutional arrangements and other constraints, and how
they shape markets,” he says. “When I teach, I stress the
importance of institutional detail in addition to analytical
finance, so students come out prepared to deal with the
complexity of the world of finance.”
Mark Zurack first came to the
Johnson School as a student,
acquiring an MBA in 1980. Then
followed 18 years with Goldman
Sachs, starting and running
the Equity Derivatives Research
Group in North America and
Asia. When he retired in 2001,
he turned to teaching, and is
now a visiting lecturer in finance
at the Johnson School.
“It seemed like a logical career
progression: to go to school, work, develop a certain level of
expertise and industry knowledge, then go back and teach
people who want to do what you used to do,” says Zurack.
His course, called Equity Derivatives and Related Products,
focuses on how those products are structured, valued, and
used by investors globally. Asked how his previous career
influences his teaching, Zurack says emphatically, “It is my
teaching. I basically have taken a section of the capital market
that I interacted with for close to 20 years and turned it into
a class. And I do it in a way that is analytical enough to have
academic rigor but at the same time practical enough so that
people who take the class can go into the industry knowing
exactly the relevance of what I’m teaching.”
Zurack also teaches at Columbia’s business school, and flies
into Ithaca once a week for his class. “No one will tell you
commuting from New York is fun,” he jokes, but “it’s a lot
easier than my old job. The Johnson School is helpful; I’ve
had good TAs, and good faculty support. It’s a disadvantage
when they cancel my flight. But I enjoy teaching, and I like
being part of the university. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t do it.”
THE JOHNSON SCHOOL ANNUAL REPORT 2007–08
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