Rebel A. Cole

Rebel A. Cole is the Lynn Eminent Scholar Professor of Finance in the College of Business at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, where he has taught since August 2016. He teaches graduate-level classes in corporate finance and financial institutions.

After receiving his PhD in Business Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Cole began his career in late 1987 as a financial economist at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, during the height of the savings & loan crisis. Here, he began a series of scholarly articles on the failures of thrift institutions, which he continued from 1989 - 1991 as a financial economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Cole returned to Washington in 1991 as a supervisory financial analyst in the Division of Banking Supervision & Regulation at the Federal Reserve Board where he led the development of SEER—the Fed's statistical early warning system for bank failures. After completing development of SEER in 1993, Cole transferred to the Board's Division of Research & Statistics, where he was the co-principal investigator of the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finance. In this position, he began what has become more than 20 years of research on the availability of credit to small firms. After completion of the survey in 1997, Cole spent one year as Chief Economist of the Employment Policies Institute in Washington D.C. before returning to academia as a professor of finance at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. After two year, Cole moved to Sydney, Australia to take a professorship at the University of New South Wales—Australia's flagship university. He remained at UNSW until July 2003, when he moved back to the U.S. for a professorship at DePaul University in Chicago, where he remained until August 2016. In August 2016, he took his current position at FAU. Since leaving the Fed in 1997, Cole also began a second career as a special advisor to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank, providing training to central bankers primarily on issues related to banking supervision. In this capacity, he has led or participated in more than 70 international missions to central banks in more than 50 countries.

Cole was born in Asheville, North Carolina on August 25, 1958 to Frank Allen Cole and Kathleen Krahenbuhl Godwin Cole. He attended St. Genevieve-Gibbons Hall for primary school, the Asheville School and Asheville High School for high school, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for college and graduate School. From UNC, he received an A.B. in Economics, Industrial Relations, and Political Science in May 1981 and a Ph.D. in Business Administration with specialization in Finance in May 1988. His sister is the lawyer Franchelle Millender, and his half-sister is the author Gail Godwin. In 2006, he married the author Caroline Lee in Nashville, TN. They lived in the Chicago Loop from 2006 until August 2016, when they moved to downtown Delray Beach, Florida.