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Heather Tookes

Heather Tookes has been on the faculty of Yale School of Management since 2004. She earned her PhD in Finance at Cornell and her BA in Economics at Brown.

Professor Tookes’ research lies at the intersection of capital markets and corporate finance. Much of her work focuses on understanding the ways in which credit market frictions interact with firms’ financing decisions. She has a particular interest in credit default swap and convertible bond markets.  She has also studied trader borrowing and has linked margin trading to the sharp declines in stock market liquidity that occur during crises.  Recently, she has written a series of papers investigating a range of topics related to COVID-19, including the effectiveness of business restrictions and the impact of the pandemic on the academic finance profession.  She teaches Corporate Finance to MBA and Executive MBA students and has won awards for her teaching.

Professor Tookes is a member of the FINRA Economic Advisory Committee, the Chair of the Academic Female Advisory Committee (AFFECT) of the American Finance Association, and a member of the Committee on Racial Diversity (CORD) of the American Finance Association. She has also served on the boards of a number of nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

She is a former Associate Editor at the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science and member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Financial Advisory Round Table.

Achievements and Awards

Yale School of Management Alumni Association Teaching Award, 2017

Yale School of Management Award for Excellence in Teaching, Executive MBA Program, 2015

Yale School of Management Alumni Association Teaching Award, 2010

Q-Group Research Grant, 2010

Morgan Stanley Equity Market Microstructure Research Grant, 2005

Selected Articles

Information, Trading, and Product Market Interactions: Cross-Sectional Implications of Informed Trading, 2008, Journal of Finance 63(1), 379-413.

Convertible Bond Arbitrage, Liquidity Externalities, and Stock Prices, with Darwin Choi and Mila Getmansky, 2009, Journal of Financial Economics 91(2), 227-251.

Convertible Bond Arbitrageurs as Suppliers of Capital, with Darwin Choi, Mila Getmansky and Brian Henderson, 2010, Review of Financial Studies 23(6), 2492-2522.

Dynamic Competition, Valuation, and Merger Activity, with Matthew Spiegel, 2013, Journal of Finance 68(1), 125-172.

Corporate Leverage, Debt Maturity, and Credit Default Swaps: The Role of Credit Supply, with Alessio Saretto, 2013, Review of Financial Studies 26(5), 1190-1247.

Trader Leverage and Liquidity, with Bige Kahraman, 2017, Journal of Finance 72(4) 1567-1610.

Margin Trading and Comovement During Crises, with Bige Kahraman, 2020, Review of Finance 24(4), 813–846.

Why Does an IPO Impact Rival Firms? with Matthew Spiegel, 2020, Review of Financial Studies 33(7), 3205–324.

Female Representation in the Academic Finance Profession, with Mila Getmansky Sherman, 2022, Journal of Finance 77(1), 317-365.

Education

PhD Cornell University

BA Brown University