Prof. Alon Brav is at present an associate professor of finance at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. His expertise is in the fields of empirical asset pricing and empirical corporate finance. Prof. Brav has also keen interest in investments. He did his Ph.D. in finance from the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago in 1998. Earlier, he was in the department of industrial engineering and management, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He did his B.A. in economics (cum laude), area of business administration in 1990 from the University of Haifa. He lives in Durham, NC. Prof. Brav teaches global financial management and investments.   

Renowned for his teaching ability, Prof. Brav has written numerous valuable papers and won several awards in his distinguished academic career. His “Myth or Reality? The Long-Run Underperformance of Initial Public Offerings: Evidence from Venture and Non-Venture-Backed Companies” with Paul Gompers, was published in the Journal of Finance. Vol.52, no.5, December 1997 and was awarded the Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper in 1998. In 2003, he received the Barclays Global Investors Michael Brennan Award at the Review of Financial studies for “Competing Theories of Financial Anomalies” with J B Heaton. In 2006, Prof. Brav got the Jensen Prize for the best corporate finance paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics. These are but a few of the awards he has received so far.

Prof. Brav is currently working on market efficiency and the rational-behavioral debate in financial econometrics. Prof. Brav’s research papers have been published among others in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial economics, and Review of Financial Studies. In the 1997 paper, “Myth or Reality? The Long-Run Underperformance of Initial Public Offerings," he and his co-author examined IPOs issued from 1975 to 1992 and found that on average, those backed by venture capital could appreciate 45% in five years. Those IPOs not backed by venture capitalists, beginning usually with considerably less money, managed to appreciate exactly half as much.