Timothy C. Johnson

Johnson was a Director at Mabon Securities, Inc. from 1979 to 1983. Following that Tim worked as a Senior Trader at the Caxton Corporation from 1989 to 1994.^[1] In 1992, he was elected fellow in perpetuity of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[7]

After completing his PhD, Tim first placed at London Business School and was there from 1999 to 2006. He then joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006 as an associate professor of finance. In 2011, he became a full professor of finance, and in 2016 was invested as the Karl and Louise Schewe Professor of Finance. Tim also received the Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012 and 2023.^[1]

His 2002 paper provides a rational explanation for the momentum anomaly.^[3] Johnson (2004) extends this line of research by looking at the stock price anomaly induced by analyst forecast dispersion, and builds a frictionless partial-equilibrium model to account for the key aspects in the asset market.^[8] His work, particularly Johnson (2006, 2008), has provided crucial insights into the fundamental origination of market liquidity, as well as its relationship with trading volume. He shows that liquidity reflects the average risk-bearing capacity of the economy and volume reflects the changing contribution of individuals to that average, which reshapes the perception of the two important features in the financial market.^[9][10]

Additionally, his research on firm investment decisions, as in Hackbarth and Johnson (2015), investigates how a firm's real exposure to systematic risk changes as operating conditions evolve, offering insightful understandings via a tractable general equilibrium model.^[11] Johnson (2022) sheds more light on the broad impact of finance on the real economy, by examining the leverage volatility relationship.^[12]