Welcome to Mr. James Cicon's webspace

I am a fifth year PhD candidate who will enter the job market in October 2011. My research and teaching interests are in corporate finance, behavioral finance, financial markets and investments.  I can teach in any area of finance.  I have a forthcoming article in European Financial Management. I have an article revise-and-resubmit at the Journal of Financial Research.  I have several completed working papers in circulation.  I graduate this year, Dec 2011 and I will attend FMA in Denver.

 

 

 

In my 13 years of industry experience, I have often observed that executives and managers reveal useful information when they speak.  I use this simple observation in much of my research.  I use advanced computer methodologies to analyze the writings of management.  I quantify these results and use them as explanatory variables in existing models of corporate/market behavior.  I have successfully applied this approach to IPOs, M&As and other corporate events.  My work has attracted the attention of senior financial economists, some of whom are now my coauthors.  I am confident that these relationships will permit me to make contributions in the highest journals of finance.

My teaching effectiveness has been proven over ten semesters at MU.  I was sole instructor for three semesters of Investments/Portfolio Management, one semester of Financial Policy and one semester of Corporate Finance.  I am scheduled to teach two sections of Financial Management this Fall.  I taught five semesters of business law in which I presented two lectures a week, wrote exams, etc.  I was TA for the MU student managed investment fund of $1,500,000.   In industry, I had many opportunities to mentor new graduates entering corporate America. These graduates were of varied sexual orientations and racial backgrounds. Regardless of the setting, industry or classroom, I feel it an honor to help inquiring minds prepare to contribute to our society.

I am an unusually gifted programmer, a skill which I developed early as a computer/software engineer, and which proved invaluable later when I was on senior staff.  I use MySQL heavily in all my work (it is a variant of SQL).  I use it to process textual databases with billions of words.  As an engineer I wrote commercial applications in VBA.  I know SAS, Matlab and Eviews from my academic work.  I use C++ heavily as well as JAVA, PHP, PERL and others.  I use the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) and R for much of my quantitative analysis (R has a great MySQL connector).  I work primarily in the Linux environment, however I was a Certified Microsoft Engineer and know their products extraordinarily well.

I have 13 years industry experience as senior staff member on some of the largest corporations in the world.  My primary role on senior staff was technology expert and liaison to engineering.  I participated in Mergers and Acquisitions, New Ventures, Entrepreneurial Activities, and in capital budgeting and asset allocation activities.  I managed cross-functional/global new-product development tasks, I advocated engineering interests with marketing, legal, management, and production teams.  I traveled to and/or coordinated activities with offices in Spain, Taiwan, Germany, and U.S. multiple sites.  I interacted effectively with industry partners such as Kodak, Microsoft and Intel.