prof. dr. Theo Vermaelen

About Theo Vermaelen

Theo Vermaelen is Professor of Finance at INSEAD where he teaches in MBA and Executive programmes, directing theAdvanced International Corporate Finance programme. He is holding The UBS Chair in Investment Banking, endowed in memoriam Henry Grunfeld. Vermaelen is a graduate from the Department of Applied Economics at the Catholic University of Leuven (Commercial Engineer) and obtained an MBA and PhD in Finance from the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago.Dr. Vermaelen started his career at the University of British Columbia, Canada in 1979 and joined the finance faculty of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1982. From 1987 on he has been on the faculty at INSEAD. He has also been a visiting professor at the London Business School, UCLA and is a regular visitor at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. He has published numerous articles on share buybacks, dividend policy, capital structure, death spiral convertibles, initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, The Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Banking and Finance. He is co-editor of the Journal of Empirical Finance. He is also a consultant to various corporations and government agencies and Programme Director of the Amsterdam Institute of Finance, a financial training institute that specializes in courses for investment bankers. Theo Vermaelen applied the results of his research on share buybacks by launching, in cooperation with KBC, in 1998 the first mutual fund exploiting the buyback anomaly, i.e. the KBC Equity Buyback Fund America. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Brendan Technologies, a California-based biotech firm.At INSEAD he is program director of the Corporate Financial Strategies in Global Markets Program and co-director of the Global Investment Workshop and the Macquarie Masters in Finance (Investment banking) program. He has directed various programs for banks such as Mees Pierson, BBL, JP Morgan, and Deutsche Bank.His research focuses corporate finance, share repurchase; death spirals; IPOs; Call Option Enhanced Reverse Convertible (COERC). His research also focuses on making the link between corporate finance and asset management. Specifically his research aims to show how corporations time the market when they make capital structure decisions and how investors can exploit these anomalies.