Prof. Russ Wermers is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he won a campus-wide teaching award during Spring 2005. His main research interests include the measurement and attribution of the performance of asset managers. This research addresses whether professional investment managers who actively manage their portfolios can consistently beat the results of passively managed index funds, as well as addressing the relative merits of different systems of ranking fund managers.
Professor Wermers also studies the investment behavior of these managers, as well as the impact of their trades on stock markets. His papers have been published in The American Economic Review, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, The Journal of Financial Economics, 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 and was nominated for the Smith-Breeden Award for the Best Paper in the Journal of Finance during 1999.
Professor Wermers also consults for the pension fund and mutual fund industries. In addition, he is working on a book on performance evaluation and attribution that is being written with both practitioners and academics in mind.