Michael Ferguson is an Assistant Professor of Finance. He earned a BS with Honors and Distinction from Indiana University. He also earned an MBA and a PhD in Finance from Indiana University. Professor Ferguson was an internal consultant at First Chicago and a financial economist at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission before teaching at the University of Arizona and Indiana University. He joined the University of Cincinnati in 1999.

Professor Ferguson currently teaches courses in Investments, Financial Institutions, Options and Futures, and Information Economics at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral level. He has previously taught courses in Corporate Finance. Professor Ferguson is also coordinator of the PhD program in Finance.

Professor Ferguson's research has focused on financial contracting and the capital markets. He has studied many aspects of financial contracting including lending discrimination, bidding and risk arbitrage in tender offers, and the corporate use of derivatives. He has also studied the cost of trading in futures markets and mis-specification of the capital asset pricing model. Professor Ferguson's research has been published in many leading academic journals including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Business, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Journal of Real Estate, Finance, and Economics, Journal of Financial Services Research, Journal of Futures Markets, and the Journal of Financial Engineering, among others. Two of these articles have been reprinted in books.

• “But I Know It When I See It: An Economic Analysis of Vague Rules,” with Stephen R. Peters.

• “Equilibrium ‘Anomalies',” with Richard L. Shockley, Journal of Finance, forthcoming.
• “Execution Costs and Their Intraday Variation in Futures Markets,” with Steven C. Mann, Journal of Business, 74 (2001), 125-160.
• “What Constitutes Evidence of Discrimination in Lending?,” with Stephen R. Peters, Journal of Finance, 50 (1995), 739-748. Reprinted in The Economics of Housing (John M. Quigley, ed.), London: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997.

• American Finance Association
• Financial Management Association

• 2003 Finalist for Smith Breeden Prize--Best Paper in Journal of Finance
• 1995 Best Paper on Futures or Options--Southern Finance Association
• 1993 Best Paper in Futures or Options on Futures--Financial Management Association

• PhD (Finance) - Indiana University
• MBA - Indiana University
• BS (Finance) with Honors and Distinction - Indiana University