Dr. Umit Gurun

The professorship was established in 2019 by Dr. Stan Liebowitz, the Ashbel Smith Professor of finance and managerial economics in the Naveen Jindal School of Management at UT Dallas. He is also co-director of the Center for the Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation. The faculty member who holds the Stan Liebowitz Distinguished Professorship shall have a record of high scholarly achievement in economics with an appreciation of markets.


“There are several inefficiencies in our society. Many consumers make poor financial choices and many firms suffer from imperfect market designs. I get great satisfaction from my research if I can offer solutions to these inefficiencies. I am grateful that I have been recognized with such an honor for my research.”

Dr. Umit Gurun is an expert in stock market efficiency, corporate finance, economics of innovation and corporate disclosure. He was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to investigate the effects of patent litigation policy on corporate innovation outputs.

His research focuses on a variety of issues in empirical asset pricing and corporate finance, including the impact of networks, trust, financial media and advertising on asset prices and investor portfolio allocation.

Gurun has been published in top journals, including Science, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Accounting Research, Management Science and Harvard Business Review. His research has also appeared in mainstream media, including Fortune, Institutional Investor and The Economist.

Gurun is an associate editor of Management Science and a research economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a past visiting professor at The University of Texas at Austin (2010-11) and Harvard University (2014).

He received his PhD from Michigan State University, his MBA from Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, and his bachelor’s degree from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.