Russell R. Wermers
Senior Consultant
Russ Wermers is the Paul J. Cinquegrana '63 Endowed Chair in Finance and Director of the Center for Financial Policy (CFP) at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland at College Park, where he won a campus-wide teaching award in 2005 and a Krowe Teaching Award (within the Smith Business School) in 2013. As Director, Professor Wermers guides the CFP in its mission of generating research that informs financial policy in the private and public sectors. His main research interests include studies of the efficiency of securities markets, as well as the role of institutional investors in setting stock prices. In addition, he studies and teaches quantitative equity strategies. Most notably, his past research has developed new approaches to measuring and attributing the performance of mutual funds, pension funds, and hedge funds, which, among other applications, can be used to identify superior active funds.
His papers have been published in leading scholarly journals, such as The American Economic Review and The Journal of Finance. His article on mutual fund “herding” and stock prices (Journal of Finance, 1999) won the NYSE Award for the Best Paper on Equity Trading in 1995. His coauthored article on mutual fund performance was a finalist for the Smith-Breeden Award for the Best Paper in the Journal of Finance during 2006/2007. His coauthored article on the use of FOIA requests by hedge funds to buy pharmaceutical stocks won the Michael J. Brennan Best Paper (Runner Up) Award from the Review of Financial Studies in 2018. Professor Wermers consults for the hedge fund, pension fund, and mutual fund industries. He is coauthor of the leading scientific textbook on performance evaluation and attribution of professional fund managers, written for academics and practitioners (2nd edition published in April 2026). He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in December 1995.
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Education
- PhD in Finance, University of California, Los Angeles
- MBA in Finance, University of California, Los Angeles
- BS in Chemical Engineering, University of Idaho
- BS in Metallurgical Engineering, University of Idaho