Douglas Cumming

Cumming is the Founding Managing Editor-in-Chief of the Review of Corporate Finance ("RCF") which started publishing papers in 2021. In Volumes 1 (2021) and 2 (2022), RCF published 32 articles and 1 book review, with 24 articles forthcoming in Volume 3 (2023). Citations to papers published in RCF totaled 356 by December 12, 2022 for 32 articles published in 2021-2022, after excluding pre-2021 citations to working-paper versions (or 454 if including prior citations and forthcoming papers), which means RCF’s citations-per-article published in 2021 and 2022 is 11.13. RCF features highly-cited authors (with 6,000-96,000+ citations), including Franklin Allen, Renee Adams, Allen Berger, David Reeb, Ronald Anderson, Thomas Chemmanur, John Doukas, Omrane Guedhami, Sadok El Ghoul, Tim Jenkinson, Shaen Corbet, Narjess Boubakri, Barbara Casu, James Chrisman, Richard Smith, Janet Kiholm-Smith, among over 100 authors worldwide from Australia, New Zealand, China, Norway, Germany, UK, Canada, U.S., France, Finland, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Cyprus, Switzerland, UAE, Pakistan, Singapore, Turkey, and Luxembourg.

Cumming created a U.S. crowdfunding tracker page that was released in fall 2021 as part of a larger effort for a new FinTech minor that he led and championed in the fall 2021 for Florida Atlantic University students. Also, it complements discussions in his crowdfunding book and crowdfunding course.

In 2018, Cumming was appointed at the DeSantis Distinguished Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at Florida Atlantic University College of Business. Cumming served as the Director of the finance area PhD program from 2018-2022 at the Florida Atlantic University College of Business. Cumming was appointed as the Chair of the Finance Department at Florida Atlantic University College of Business in 2022. Cumming's former PhD students include Feng Zhan, Minjie Zhang, Dan Li, Yelin Zhang, and Rejo Peter. Cumming has been a Visiting Professor at the Birmingham Business School, University of Cambridge Judge Business School, Goethe University of Frankfurt, Kobe University, University of South Carolina Darla Moore School of Business, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, University of Macau, Politecnico Milano, the Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Shanghai Lixin University of Accounting and Finance, Indian Institute of Management Shillong, and Nanyang University.

Cumming served on the Advisory Committee for the Ontario Securities Commission, 2016-2017. He served on the Small and Medium Sized Enterprises Committee. Cumming served on the Advisory Committee for the National Crowdfunding and Fintech Association of Canada, in 2014-current.

Crowdfunding and FinTech scholarship: Cumming is the most frequently cited author in the world that researches crowdfunding. Cumming's 2015 paper on equity crowdfunding is the first empirical study on the topic and the most often cited paper in the world on the topic. Cumming and his PhD student Robert Reardon created a U.S. securities crowdfunding tracker. Cumming and his coauthor Sofia Johan have created a university course on crowdfunding.

Cumming has provided pro bono work for the Democracy Forward Foundation, offering advice on a brief pertaining to the NASDAQ Diversity Rule, mostly on the body of work that links diversity to fraud (pursuant to his 2015 Academy of Management Journal paper).

Cumming advised the Canadian Securities Association and Ontario Securities Commission about mutual fund trailer fees in Canada, and carried out empirical work to advise their position on the regulation of mutual fund fees in 2015. The report is here: “A Dissection of Mutual Fund Fees, Flows, and Performance", which gave rise to debates about the use of trailer fees (12b-1 fees) in Canada and subsequent regulatory changes banning trailer fees for certain mutual fund structures in Canada.

Cumming served as Managing Editor-in-Chief of numerous academic journals, including Finance Research Letters "FRL" (2015-2017), the Journal of Corporate Finance "JCF" (2018-2020), the British Journal of Management "BJM" (2020-2022), and the Journal of Industrial and Business Economics "JIBE" (2021-current). FRL's cites/doc increased from 0.653 to 1.222 (87% increase) in the three years he was Managing Editor-in-Chief; JCF's impact factor increased from 2.394 to 4.308 (80% increase) in the three years he was Managing Editor-in-Chief; BJM's cites/doc increased from 3.023 to 6.567 (117% increase) after his first year as Managing Editor-in-Chief; JIBE's cites/doc increased from 0.720 to 1.824 (153% increase) after his first year as Editor-in-Chief.

Financial market misconduct scholarship: Cumming has published many papers on stock exchange trading misconduct and trading rules, including the first paper on how differences in trading rules governing market manipulation across countries and over time affect liquidity published in the 2011 Journal of Financial Economics. Cumming's 2015 research in the Academy of Management Journal was the first to establish that board of director gender diversity gives rise to a reduction in the frequency and severity of securities fraud, as featured by the New York Times in April 2014. His most recent work in this area shows how rumors surrounding M&As cause harm to deals and their values, which he published in 2021 in the Journal of Financial Economics.

Venture capital and private equity scholarship: Over 2001-2021, Cumming was the most frequently published academic author in the world in the area of venture capital and the third most cited author in the world on venture capital; also, he was the second most frequently published academic author in the world in the area of private equity and the most cited author in the world on private equity. Cumming's 2010 research in the Journal of International Business Studies, first presented at the European Finance Association in 2004, was the first to show that private equity fund managers exaggerate their expected returns reported to institutional investors on investments that have not yet been exited. Cumming’s work on government venture capital was influential in leading to a repeal of tax subsidies to labor-sponsored venture capital funds in Canada. Cumming's work from his 1999 PhD thesis and published in 2005 in the Journal of Business Venturing was the first to show that non-US venture capital funds, and US venture capital funds that invest outside the US, typically do not use convertible preferred securities. Cumming found similar evidence with European data that he published in the Review of Financial Studies in 2008 and European Economic Review in 2008. Cumming recounts the difficulty of publishing on this topic since it went against the conventional wisdom at the time, and how related issues have evolved into a segregated literature on entrepreneurial finance across finance versus management/entrepreneurship journals.

Right after his J.D./Ph.D., Cumming joined the University of Alberta School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Finance in 1999. In 2004, he joined the University of New South Wales School of Banking and Finance as an Associate Professor of Finance with tenure. In 2005, he joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Lally School of Management as an Associate Professor of Finance with tenure. In 2007, Cumming joined the Schulich School of Business, York University as Associate Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship and Ontario Research Chair. Cumming was promoted to Full Professor and Ontario Research Chair at the Schulich School of Business in 2010. His Ontario Research Chair was renewed in 2014 for an additional 7-year term. From 2008-2016, Cumming served as the Director of the finance area PhD program at the Schulich School of Business.

Cumming received a First Class Joint Honors Degree in Economics and Finance from the McGill University Faculty of Management, and was awarded the Sir Edward Beatty Medal and Cherry Prize in 1992. He received a Masters in Economics from Queen's University in 1993. He contemporaneously completed a J.D. in law at the University of Toronto Law School and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Toronto over the 5-year period 1994-1999. In 2002, Cumming was awarded the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.

Cumming was a junior short track speedskater and competed in the 1987 North American Indoor Junior Championships and won the overall title, as well as two silver medals at the Canada Winter Games. Cumming has completed a number of marathons, including the 2001 Boston Marathon in a time of 3:05. Cumming is an active skateboarder and snowboarder.

Douglas J. Cumming (born on October 18, 1970) is a Canadian financial economist. He is the DeSantis Distinguished Professor of Finance and the Chair of the Finance Department at the College of Business, Florida Atlantic University and a Visiting Professor at the Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham. Cumming specializes in financial market misconduct, financial technology (FinTech), entrepreneurial finance (including angel investment, venture capital, private debt, and private equity), mutual funds, hedge funds, entrepreneurship, international business, and law. In 2022, Cumming was listed as one of the top-92 cited scholars in the world in the area of business and economics.