Christopher Geczy
Chris Geczy has been on the Finance Department faculty at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania since 1997. He is Academic Director of the Jacobs Levy Equity Management Center for Quantitative Financial Research. He is also Academic Director of the Wharton Wealth Management Initiative at Wharton Executive Education. He has a B.A. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in finance and econometrics from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago (now the Booth School).
Dr. Geczy regularly teaches investment management and co-created the first full course on hedge funds at The Wharton School. In 2013, he created the school’s first survey course in sustainable/ESG investing, open to undergraduates as well as MBA and Executive Education students. He has created and taught many courses at Wharton Executive Education, and he has taught AIMR/CFA Institute-accredited professional Risk Management courses through the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
He has been the Academic Director of a number of Wharton Executive Education programs including the 2009 Securities Industry Institute in partnership with SIFMA, the Private Wealth Management program in partnership with The CFA Institute, and programs for the Investments and Wealth Institute (formerly IMCA). In addition, he has taught Investment Management in the Penn-Securities Association of China (Penn-SAC) program for a number of years. He received the Best Elective Course Teaching Award in the Wharton Executive MBA Program and the Wharton Teaching Excellence Award for the 2017-2018 academic year.
Dr. Geczy’s current research focuses on various topics including multifactor models, wealth management, risk management, asset allocation, the performance of managed funds including hedge funds, venture capital and private equity as well as other alternatives, Impact Investing and ESG incorporation in funds and portfolios, and various aspects of equity lending and short-selling. His work has appeared in numerous books and scholarly journals including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Portfolio Management, The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Journal of Political Economy. In 2018, Dr. Geczy and co-authors won the Investment for Impact Prize of the Center for Responsible Business at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business for their research paper “Contracts With (Social) Benefits: The Implementation of Impact Investing.”
He currently serves on Intel’s US Retirement Plans’ Investment Policy Committee. He has served on the Economic Advisory Board of NASDAQ and has been an editor of the Journal of Alternative Investments. He is currently Founding Co-Editor of the Financial Planning Review, the academic journal of the CFP® Board Center for Financial Planning. He is also a founding board member and past Chairman of the Mid-Atlantic Hedge Fund Association and serves an Affiliated Faculty member of the Wharton Social Impact Initiative and formerly of the Wharton Sports Business Initiative. Dr. Geczy also serves as a Trustee and member of the Investment Committee of The Episcopal Academy.
His research has been reported in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Forbes, NPR, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” and in numerous other media.