Bill Schwert is the Distinguished University Professor of Finance and Statistics Emeritus at the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School. He came to Rochester in 1976, after spending the 1975-76 academic year at the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor of Finance. He received his A.B. with honors in economics from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in 1971, his M.B.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1975 both from the University of Chicago.

Bill has been a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1988. He was the Chair of the Business and Economics Section of the American Statistical Association in 1990, and from 1987-89 he was a Director of the American Finance Association. In 2019, he was selected as a Fellow of the American Finance Association. He was one of the Editors of the Journal of Financial Economics starting in 1979 and from 1996-2021 he was the Managing Editor. He was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Finance from 1983-2000.

In 1982, Bill was the first Center for Research in Security Prices Distinguished Research Scholar at the University of Chicago. He was one of three recipients of the Batterymarch Research Fellowship for the 1982-83 academic year. He was also among the first group of ten Mentors at the University of Rochester, an award based on scholarship and teaching. He is included Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Economics, Who’s Who in Finance and Industry, Who’s Who in American Education, Who’s Who in the East, and Who’s Who Lifetime Achievement. His paper “Why Does Stock Market Volatility Change Over Time?” won a Smith-Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize from the Journal of Finance in 1990 and his paper “Stock Market Volatility” won the Graham and Dodd Plaque from the Financial Analysts Journal in 1990.

Bill’s research has covered broad areas of economics, finance and statistics, including:

• the relations among interest rates, inflation rates and asset returns;
• the effects of stock market volatility on asset returns;
• the effects of government regulation on business;
• the market for corporate control,
• the behavior of the IPO market and
• the use of modern time series techniques to analyze economic and financial data.

His papers have been cited more than 11,700 times by published books and journal articles covered in the Social Science Citation Index and Scopus. Google Scholar shows that his papers have been cited more than 36,000 times. Doctoral students he has supervised are now faculty members, many with chaired professorships, at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the Tuck School at Dartmouth, and Northwestern University, among others.