Maureen O'Hara, the Robert W. Purcell Professor of Finance at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, presented the Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School inJune.

Her three lectures in the prestigious series were titled "Microstructure in a Theory of Finance." The talks took place at the Fourth Annual Oxford Finance Summer Symposium, a 10-day symposium of seminars and workshops attended by some of the world's leading finance scholars.

In her lecture "Markets and Asset Pricing," O'Hara examined how information risks in securities trading affect returns on assets. In "Markets and Corporate Finance," she described how the proportion of information-based trades affects the cost of firms' capital. And in "The Role of Microstructure," O'Hara discussed the design of rules and procedures for trading assets and their influence on the efficiency of markets. The talks form the basis of a book, to be published by Oxford University Press, which sponsors the series.

At the Johnson School, O'Hara's research focuses on issues in market microstructure. Recently she has studied the role of underwriters in the aftermarket trading of initial public offerings; the impact of transparency on trading system performance; listing and delisting issues in securities markets; designing markets for developing markets; and the role of liquidity and information risk in asset pricing.

She is the author of "Market Microstructure Theory" (Blackwell, 1995). In addition, she publishes widely on a broad range of topics, including banking and financial intermediaries, law and finance and experimental economics. She recently concluded six years as the executive editor of The Review of Financial Studies. She was the first woman to be named president of the American Finance Association, considered the premier academic organization for financial economics. She also is a former president of the Western Finance Association.