Travis L. Johnson

About

Travis Johnson is an Associate Professor of Finance at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, a position he has held since 2020 after joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2012. He has also served as a visiting professor at the University of St. Gallen and the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

His research focuses on empirical asset pricing, the application of AI and machine learning in finance, market frictions, and financial econometrics. He holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.S. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Working Papers

• Past is Prologue: Inference from the Cross Section of Returns Around an Event (with Jonathan Cohn, Zack Liu, and Malcolm Wardlaw), 2025 Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Financial Economics
• The Performance of Characteristic-Sorted Portfolios: Evaluating the Past and Predicting the Future (with Aydogan Alti and Sheridan Titman), 2025 Q-Group Jack Treynor Prize Winner
• Anatomy of Trading Costs for Retail Investors: Savings from Off-Exchange Execution (with Thomas K. Brown, S.P. Kothari, and Eric C. So), 2025

Publications

1. Distortions Caused by Lending Fee Retention (with Gregory Weitzner) [Free Version] [Audio Summary] Management Science 71 (2025), 35-58
2. On the Economic Value of Stock Market Return Predictors (with Scott Cederburg and Michael S. O'Doherty) [Free Version] Review of Finance 27 (2023), 617-657
3. Reputation and Investor Activism: A Structural Approach (with Nathan Swem) [Free Version] [Online Appendix] [Reputation data] Journal of Financial Economics 139 (2021), 29-56
4. Expectations Management and Stock Returns (with Jinhwan Kim and Eric C. So) [Free Version] [Online Appendix] [EMI data] Review of Financial Studies 33 (2020), 4580-4626
5. A Fresh Look at Return Predictability Using a More Efficient Estimator [Free Version] [Online Appendix] [Data and code] Review of Asset Pricing Studies 9 (2019), 1-46 (Editor's Choice, Best Paper Award)
6. Time Will Tell: Information in the Timing of Scheduled Earnings News (with Eric C. So) [Free Version] Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 53 (2018), 2431-2464
7. A Simple Multimarket Measure of Information Asymmetry (with Eric C. So) [Free Version] [MIA data] Management Science 64 (2018), 1055-1080
8. Asymmetric Trading Costs Prior to Earnings Announcements: Implications for Price Discovery and Returns (with Eric C. So) [Free Version] [Online Appendix] Journal of Accounting Research 56 (2018), 217-263
9. Risk Premia and the VIX Term Structure [Free Version] [Data] Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 52 (2017), 2461-2490
10. The Option to Stock Volume Ratio and Future Returns (with Eric C. So) [Free Version] Journal of Financial Economics 106 (2012), 262-286