Brian Blank (economist)

Douglas Brian Blank, II, (born May 19, 1988) is an American assistant professor of finance at Mississippi State University and lives in Starkville, Mississippi.
Blank was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and earned undergraduate and Masters degrees in finance, statistics, and mathematics from University of Alabama, after which he began his career as a consultant specializing in companies facing critical challenges including fraud, bankruptcy, and litigation. He has consulted for some of the largest firms in the country, with much of his expertise focusing on advising financial institutions. One project involved tracing cash on behalf of a financial institution victim of a $500 million Ponzi scheme. He has also valued businesses through the process of performing due diligence related to an international healthcare acquisition and analyzing the cost of being interrupted by the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States, in addition to partnership buyouts.
He received his Ph.D. in 2016 from University of Tennessee Haslam College of Business, with Tracie Woidtke as an advisor, where he developed expertise in researching empirical corporate finance and corporate governance. His dissertation was titled "Does Political Giving Impact Shareholder Wealth? Evidence from State Campaign Finance Reforms". He has served as a faculty member at Mississippi State University from 2016 to the Present, where he researches and teaching corporate finance topics in addition to serving on student research committees. 
His 21st century work involves financial economics, and he has published in journals like the Journal of Corporate Finance, among others. His research has also been presented at conferences both in the United States and abroad. For example, domestic presentations include the Financial Management Association, American Real Estate Society, Financial Markets and Corporate Governance Conference, Alabama Association of Financial Planners, and Association of Private Enterprise Education, while those abroad include the European Financial Management Association, Eastern Finance Association, and Allied Korea Finance Association. Specifically, he studies executive compensation and incentives. His best-cited research is titled, "Do incentives work? Option-based compensation and corporate innovation," which exploits FAS 123R to show that innovation is not motivated solely by option-based compensation as prior research had suggested. His research is of interest to not only academics but also industry professionals and has been cited more than fifty times collectively. Blank studies topics ranging from insider tradingto the expertise and succession planning of executive officers, and has published articles with ten different coauthors. Moreover, his productivity ranks among the top 4% of researchers at this stage in their careers. 
Blank has also contributed to dozens of media regarding the Federal Reserve, Economy of the United States, and Recession, many of which resulted from his research on executive expertise and economic downturns. For example, he wrote about the Federal Reserve of the United States raising interest rates by 0.75 percentage point in 2022, which was read more than one hundred thousand times and resulted in multiple radio interviews. Collectively, his articles written for The Conversation (website) have been read over two hundred thousand times and have been reposted on various websites, including Yahoo!, The World Economic Forum, WallStreet Window, and HowStuffWorks. He has also been asked to provide personal finance expertise at websites like WalletHub. His research has also resulted in articles and interviews on multiple occasions by outlets including Forbes, Reuters, BBC, ABC News (Australia), and WTVA. 
Category:1988 births
Category:American academics
Category:People from Birmingham, Alabama