01 July 2016 12:45PM
Professor Andrew Patton has been named the Zelter Family Professor of Economics, effective July 1.
Endowed by Duke University alumnus James C. Zelter ’84, the Zelter Chair in Financial Economics was created to support the mission of the Duke Financial Economics Center (DFE) to combine research, teaching, and academic study in financial economics.
This contribution comes at a time of growth for the DFE, which recently dedicated two newly renovated spaces within the Department of Economics to finance faculty and students.
“Jim’s unending contributions to the DFE have enabled us to grow and have impact greater than we thought possible,” said DFE Executive Director John Caccavale. In addition to serving on the DFE Steering Committee, Zelter has “personally connected his firm, Apollo Management, to Duke, enabling a fantastic relationship that has provided great internship and career opportunities for Duke undergrads.”
From Patton’s perspective, the DFE cultivates an equally fruitful environment for finance faculty. “The concentration of faculty working in financial economics and financial econometrics at Duke, and the opportunity to teach courses related to my own research in this area — such as my Forecasting Financial Markets course, which I have taught almost every year since I came to Duke — is just great,” Patton said. “I have access to great colleagues working on problems closely related to my own, while being part of a big, diverse, and active group of economists from a range of fields.”
Professors Tim Bollerslev and Craig Burnside nominated Patton for the professorship. In his endorsement, Bollerslev commented on Patton’s research and contributions to the field, specifically noting that he is “now widely recognized as one of the foremost experts in the world on the use of copulas in economics and finance” and among the “top five economists in his cohort based upon field-, age-, and department-adjusted citations to his work.”
Patton was one of 21 Duke University faculty members to be awarded a distinguished professorship. This group was recognized at a May 4 dinner at the American Tobacco Campus.
“At the dinner hosted by President Brodhead, I was also humbled by the extremely impressive people from around the university also receiving this honor,” he said. “Hearing all those inspiring stories of colleagues from around the university made me want to get back to my office and get to work."
Economics Department