Joel Shapiro

Joel Shapiro is Associate Professor of Finance at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. His main area of expertise is the regulation and governance of financial institutions. He has conducted research on Credit Rating Agencies, executive compensation, LIBOR, and conflicts of interest in retail finance.

Credit rating agencies’ (CRAs’) ratings performed poorly for structured finance products and have been criticised for contributing to the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Joel has published research demonstrating that encouraging more competition in the CRA market is not likely to improve CRA performance, and that regulation should be more focused on their fee structure. This work was cited is cited in rules proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Joel is also author of the entry on credit rating agencies in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Online Edition, 2010).

Governance is one of Joel’s key areas of enquiry. His research into governance and risk within the financial sector proposes linking pay packages for executives at financial institutions to credit default swaps. This work was awarded second prize in the 2011 Research Prize on Banking Regulation sponsored by the International Centre for Financial Regulation and the Financial Times and has been reported on in several media outlets.

Prior to joining Saïd Business School, Joel was a tenured associate professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He received his PhD and MA in Economics from Princeton University. He has been a visiting lecturer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the New York University Stern School of Business as well as visiting researcher for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.