Bill Megginson is Professor and Rainbolt Chair in Finance at the University of Oklahoma’s Michael F. Price College of Business. He is also Executive Director the Privatization Barometer. From 2002 to 2007, he was a voting member of the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance’s Global Advisory Committee on Privatization. During spring 2008, he was the Fulbright Tocqueville Distinguished Chair in American Studies and Visiting Professor at the Université-Paris Dauphine.
Professor Megginson’s research interest has focused on the privatization of state-owned enterprises, especially those privatizations executed through public share offering, and more recently on sovereign wealth fund investments. He has published refereed articles in several top academic journals, including the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Foreign Policy. His co-authored study documenting significant performance improvements in recently privatized companies received one of two Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper Awards for outstanding research published in the Journal of Finance during 1994. He is author or co-author of eight textbooks.
Professor Megginson’s research has been frequently cited in academic and professional publications. His articles have been downloaded over 29,000 times from the Social Sciences Research Network, and his books and articles have been cited over 6,000 times (according to Google Scholar). His co-authored privatization survey article, published in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2001, is the eight most widely cited finance article published since 2000, and the most widely cited article published in 2001. He is associate editor for four academic journals, and has served as a privatization consultant for the New York Stock Exchange, the OECD, the IMF, the World Federation of Exchanges, and the World Bank. He has visited 70 countries during his lifetime, and has lived in Spain, Pakistan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and France, in addition to the United States.
Dr. Megginson has a B.S. degree in chemistry from Mississippi College, an MBA from Louisiana State University, and a Ph.D. in finance from Florida State University. Prior to entering academia in 1986, he worked for five years as a petroleum chemist at the world’s largest styrene monomer plant and at the largest independent petroleum refinery in the United States. He has been a Visiting Professor at Duke University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Zurich, the University of Amsterdam, Bocconi University, and Université-Paris Dauphine.
