Travis L. Johnson

Associate Professor of Finance

Academic Appointments

• Associate Professor of Finance, McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, 2020-Present
• Assistant Professor of Finance, McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, 2012-2020
• Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015-2016

Editorial Appointments

• Associate Editor, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2022-2025

Research Areas

• Empirical asset pricing, information and frictions in financial markets, financial econometrics, asset management

Education

• Ph.D. in Finance, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, 2012
• B.S. in Mathematics, Minor in Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007

Publications

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

Working Papers

• The Performance of Characteristic-Sorted Portfolios: Evaluating the Past and Predicting the Future (with Aydogan Alti and Sheridan Titman), 2024
  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), 2024
• Past is Prologue: Inference from the Cross Section of Returns Around an Event (with Jonathan Cohn, Zack Liu, and Malcolm Wardlaw), 2024

Media Coverage

• "Time Will Tell: Information in the Timing of Scheduled Earnings News": Forbes
• "Reputation and Investor Activism: A Structural Approach": Bloomberg, Bloomberg
• "Distortions Caused by Lending Fee Retention": Reuters, Canadian Investment Review
• My intramural basketball team in grad school: Wall Street Journal

Personal

• Born in Madison, WI, USA
• Married, two children
• Hobbies include: computer games, hiking, basketball, golf, poker, canoeing