Laurence F. Whittemore Professor of Business Administration; Professor of Finance
Corporate valuation, natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), industrial organization, M&A, private equity, venture capital
Venture Capital & Private Equity, NLP, Maching Learning, and AI in Finance
PhD and MA, Harvard University, 1991; BA, Northwestern University, 1986
Gordon Phillips is the Laurence F. Whittemore Professor of Business Administration and a professor of finance. He teaches the 2nd year course Venture Capital and Private Equity and specializes in private equity, mergers, and the impact of financial decisions on firms' strategic decisions. He is a faculty advisor at the Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital, where he was the faculty director for 5 years, reorganizing and helping to expand the previously named Center for Private Equity. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a visiting research professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He previously taught at the University of Southern California and the University of Maryland. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, Duke University, HEC Paris, Insead, MIT, and Southern Mediterranean University. He received his MA and Ph.D. from Harvard University and his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. His areas of research include corporate finance and how financial decisions impact firms' strategic decisions, and contracting in financial markets. His work in corporate finance includes studies of private equity issuance, capital structure, Chapter 11 bankruptcy, how leverage buyouts and other forms of high debt influence a firms' and rivals' investment decisions.
Recent research published in the Journal of Political Economy and the Review of Financial Studies has been on applying computational linguistics to firm financial statements to analyze merger synergies, dividends and product market competition. Research published in the Journal of Finance has been on real and financial booms and busts and mergers and acquisitions and how firms organize across multiple markets. He recently presented the keynote address on PIPEs (private investment in public equity) to an audience of executives and finance professionals. He has served as an associate editor at The Review of Financial Studies and The Journal of Corporate Finance.