William Megginson

  

 

Through the early 21^st century, there was an unambiguous global trend toward reducing government ownership of business enterprise, but this trend has since at least been slowed, and perhaps even reversed.

Financial economist and scholar William Megginson will discuss the history of natural monopoly privatization, discuss which models have been adopted for the most important companies, and assess how well these regulatory efforts have worked. 

"Over the last three decades, a wave of privatization—totaling over $3.5 trillion since 1997—focused mainly on natural monopolies has fully or partially transferred great swathes of these industries to private ownership, prompting an urgent need to establish independent regulatory agencies to oversee these now-private monopolies and ensure both continuity of service and consumer protection from extortionary pricing," Megginson said. "Governments have adopted many different types of regulatory models for these agencies, but the two most important are the rate of return regulation model, long used in the United States, and the and price-cap model adopted for most early British privatized utilities." 

As part of the MSU Initiative for Regulation and Applied Economic Analysis’ Visiting Scholar Program, Megginson will discuss his research about the economic and political developments relating to privatization, state capitalism, and state ownership of business. Megginson is the keynote speaker to a two-day workshop being held for accounting and finance scholars. 

 

William Megginson is Professor and Price Chair in Finance at the University of Oklahoma’s Michael F. Price College of Business. He is also the Saudi Aramco Chair Professor in Finance at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. 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. He received the University of Oklahoma’s top research prize, a George Lynn Cross Research Professorship, in April 2010.

Megginson's research interest has focused in recent years on the privatization of state-owned enterprises, sovereign wealth fund investments, energy finance, and investment banking principles and practices. 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 Review of Financial Studies, 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 nine textbooks. 

Megginson’s research has been frequently cited in academic and professional publications. His articles have been downloaded over 48,000 times from the Social Sciences Research Network, and his books and articles have been cited over 12,000 times (according to Google Scholar). His co-authored privatization survey article, published in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2001, is the eighth most widely cited finance article published since 2000, and the most widely cited article published in 2001.  He is associate editor for two 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 76 countries during his lifetime, and has lived in Spain, Pakistan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, and Saudi Arabia, in addition to the United States.

He 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.

 

For additional information, contact  Dr. Gary Caton or Dr. Edward Gamble