Faculty Profile: Dr. Ivalina Kalcheva

Assistant professor Ivalina (Iva) Kalcheva received her PhD in finance from University of Utah in 2007.  Her last year at the University of Utah was sponsored by the University of Utah Graduate Research Fellowship Award. This prestigious fellowship is awarded only to the very best doctoral students, following a competition of research proposals (only 16 were awarded university-wide). She joined the University of Arizona in the fall of 2007.

Kalcheva's research interests lie mainly on theoretical and empirical research on the overlap between market microstructure and classical fields in finance: asset pricing, corporate finance. In a recent paper titled "Liquidity Biases in Asset Pricing Tests" Kalcheva presents evidence of a significant upward bias in the estimated returns premium for illiquidity that is attributable to microstructure-based noise in stock returns. The paper introduces a simple correction for the bias and finds evidence of a significant return premia for illiquidity after the correction. Kalcheva's paper "International Evidence on Cash Holdings and Expected Managerial Agency Problems" is forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies.

Ivalina Kalcheva's work has been presented at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), CIBER 4th Doctoral Internalization Consortium in Finance (the UCLA Anderson School of Management), FMA and FMA Doctoral Seminar and Special PhD Sessions, 8th Annual Frank Batten Young Scholars Conference in Finance (College of William and Mary) where the paper "Liquidity Biases in Asset Pricing Tests" won the Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS) Award for Best Paper as well as in research seminars at a number of universities.

Professor Kalcheva she is currently teaching Investments (FIN 421) and Empirical Methods in Finance (FIN 525).