Contributors

Fabio Moneta is an Associate Professor of Finance and a Royal Bank of Canada Fellow of Finance at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. With a last name that literally translates to “money” and originating from Pisa, Italy, Fabio Moneta has always had a strong interest in the history of finance. He concentrates his research work on investments, sustainable finance, institutional investors, trading behaviour, forecasting, mutual fund performance, and empirical asset pricing to identify societal and economic benefits.

Professor Moneta received his PhD in Finance from the Carroll School of Management, Boston College. He also holds an MSc in Finance from CORIPE Piemonte (Turin, Italy) and a BA in Economics from the University of Pisa in Italy. Before joining Telfer, he was an Assistant Professor at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University. He has published articles in leading journals such as Critical Finance Review, Energy Economics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Empirical Finance, and Management Science. He is recipient of the 2020 Hillsdale Investment Management – CFA Society Toronto Investment Research Award and several external grants including three grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and a grant from the Canadian Securities Institute Research Foundation. His research has been featured in various media outlets such as Bloomberg Businessweek and Morningstar.

Walid Ben-Amar is full professor and Telfer Research Fellow in Sustainability Accounting at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. A chartered professional accountant (CPA) in Ontario, he holds a Master’s degree in accounting from Université du Québec à Montréal and a PhD in business administration from HEC Montréal. Professor Ben-Amar teaches financial accounting courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs at the Telfer School of Management. He was a recipient of a University of Ottawa’s excellence in education prize in 2019.

His areas of research include corporate governance, corporate social responsibility and corporate disclosure strategies. His current research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) focus on climate risk reporting and governance. Professor Ben Amar has published his work in academic journals such as Journal of Business Ethics, Accounting Auditing & Accountability Journal, Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, European Accounting Review, British Journal of Management and Comptabilité-Contrôle-Audit.

Ali Akyol is an Associate Professor in Finance at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. In his research, he mainly focuses on the effect of governance-related regulations, the board of directors, firm disclosure, and financial misconduct on shareholder value. Professor Akyol’s research interest in corporate governance started in 2001, the year that he started his PhD in Finance. In 2001, The US experienced the largest corporate bankruptcy to date driven by corporate governance failures. That corporate bankruptcy was soon followed by other large-scale corporate bankruptcies – all caused by corporate governance failures. Those corporate governance failures and the subsequent loss of value experienced by shareholders were what led him to work in corporate governance. In recent years, he has focused on how new technologies (such as machine learning) could be used in governance research and how they could be tailored to produce results that could be used by both management and investors to make better decisions.

Jonathan Li earned his PhD from the University of Toronto in Operations Research and Financial Engineering. His research examines a wide array of operational, financial, and technological problems from a risk perspective and proves the economic value of rigorous risk management. Topics he has studied include capacity planning, asset-liability management, asset pricing, portfolio management, financial technology (Fintech) adoption, where risk could arise from the change of global markets and climate, the impact of pandemics, and the disruptive innovation of technology. Professor Li offers data-driven and analytics-powered methodologies for these problems, leveraging his expertise in optimization, machine learning, and financial econometrics. His work has appeared in the leading academic journals, Management Science and Operations Research.

Lamia Chourou is an Associate Professor of Accounting and CPA Ontario Fellow at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. She earned her PhD from Smith School of business, Queen’s University. Her research interests include the study of the determinants and consequences of firm CSR engagements. Professor Chourou investigated topics such as the effect of formal and informal institutions on CSR and corporate philanthropy, and the effect of CSR on corporate decisions.