Dr Howard Jones is a Senior Research Fellow in Finance at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. His areas of expertise include initial public offerings (IPOs), investment banks, private equity and institutional asset management.

Jones joined Saїd Business School in 2003 after a 15-year career in investment banking. He had previously worked at Deutsche Bank and at BNP Paribas, where he was worldwide head of equity capital markets, responsible for all equity capital raising. Earlier in his career Howard worked in debt capital markets and fixed income trading.

Jones’s research has focused on IPOs, and in particular on the conflicting incentives of the parties involved; investment banks, investors and companies. His recent analysis, revealing how and why international investment banks charge significantly higher IPO fees to American companies than to their European counterparts, was published in the Journal of Finance. It attracted considerable attention from media outlets including The Economist, Reuters, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Handelsblatt and Bloomberg.

A graduate of Oxford University, Jones has a PhD in linguistics from the University of London. He has been a visiting lecturer at HEC Business School in Paris and Imperial College Business School in London.

Areas of expertise include:
• Initial public offerings
• Investment banks
• Private equity
• Institutional asset management

Jones’s research interests lie in the role of investment banks in capital raising, private equity and institutional asset management. His work has been published in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies and European Financial Management, as well as in practitioner journals and the financial press.

Investment banks and conflicts of interest

To date Jones’s research has focused on the incentives and conflicts of interests that investment banks face when dealing with investors and issuing companies in initial public offerings (IPOs). A recent paper entitled ‘Why don’t U.S. issuers demand European fees for IPOs?’ published in the Journal of Finance (2011), which examines the discrepancy between IPO fees in Europe and the US, concludes that the US market is less competitive than the European, and reveals evidence of implicit collusion among US underwriters.

His 2009 paper ‘IPO pricing and allocations: a survey of the views of institutional investors’ found that the pricing and allotment of IPOs by investment banks reflects a combination of profit-maximization and the desire to create a stable investor base for the issuer. Another 2009 paper, ‘Competitive IPOs,’ examines the ways in which issuers have altered the design of IPOs to enhance their own bargaining position vis-à-vis investment banks.

Jones and his co-author, Tim Jenkinson, were awarded the best paper prize in 2007 by European Financial Management for their research entitled ‘The economics of IPO stabilization, syndicates and naked shorts,’ which examines one mechanism by which the interests of issuer and investment banks can be aligned.

Jones has a related interest in the role of research analysts. He was one of a group of experts mandated to report to the European Commission on best practice for financial analysts, and he has been actively involved in debates about how to guard against bias in analysts’ research.

Related publications

Abrahamson, M., Jenkinson, T. and Jones, H., 'Why don't U.S. issuers demand European fees for IPOs?', Journal of Finance, 66(6) (2011), 2055-2082.

Jenkinson, T. and Jones, H., 'Competitive IPOs', European Financial Management, 15(4) (2009), 733-756.

Jenkinson, T. and Jones, H., 'IPO pricing and allocations: a survey of the views of institutional investors', Review of Financial Studies, 22(4) (2009), 1477-1504.

Jenkinson, T. and Jones, H., 'The Economics of IPO Stabilization, Syndicates and Naked Shorts', European Financial Management, 13(4) (2007), 616-642 (Best Paper award for 2007).

Jenkinson, T. and Jones, H., 'Bids and Allocations in European IPO Bookbuilding', Journal of Finance, 59(5) (2004), 2309-2338.

Jones, H., 'Financial Analysts: Best Practices in an Integrated European Financial Market', Experts’ Report to the European Commission, September 2003.

‘Keeping them honest? An analysis of competitive IPOs’, International Financing Review, October 2009.

‘Are banks profiteering in IPOs?’ Professional Investor, November 2007.

‘The Bookbuilding Debate’, Capital Ideas, January 2004.

‘IPOs have hidden costs for issuers’, Mint, 3 September 2007.

‘Google empowers the end-investor’, Financial Times, 28 June 2004.

‘Google can find a way to price its shares fairly’, Financial Times, 3 November 2003.

‘The FSA needs to focus on research quality’, Financial Times, 1 October 2003.

‘Analysis Paralysis: Is investment research in integrated banks a case of synergy or chicanery?’, Business at Oxford, 2003

‘Breaking up the banks’, Financial Times, 27 August 2002.

‘IPOs von Töchtern sind in Mode gekommen’, Börsen-Zeitung, 10 June 2000.

Private equity funds and IPOs

Jones is currently working on a number of projects related to IPOs backed by private equity (PE) firms. He is particularly interested in how PE-backed IPOs perform, at issue and afterwards, compared with other IPOs, and why and for how long PE firms retain holdings in portfolio companies after they have listed them.

Pension fund management

In this area, Jones is examining the effectiveness of trustees in making asset allocation decisions, the input they receive from their advisers, and the incentives under which they operate. The aim is to explore the relationship between different models of pension fund governance on the one hand and pension fund performance on the other.

Dr Jones’s teaching includes core finance courses and specialist courses on capital raising and market microstructure.

Howard Jones teaches:
Masters in Law and Finance -  Finance 2
Diploma in Financial Strategy - Finance 2

Also active in programme design and management, he is Director of the Diploma in Financial Strategy and Deputy Director of the Master’s in Law and Finance (MLF). He helped set up the Master’s in Financial Economics (MFE) and was Director of the programme for its first two years (2005–2007).

Jones received the Teaching Innovation Award from the 2009 graduating Executive MBA class for his Capital Raising course.

Jones has authored articles in the financial press and industry publications, including the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Börsen-Zeitung, the International Financing Review, and Professional Investor. Most of his writing has been on the role of investment banks, but he writes on a range of subjects: see, for example, his recent Wall Street Journal ‘Internet Wars: Version 2.0,’ 5 August 2011 article on social gaming companies.

Jones acts a consultant to issuing firms on capital raising, and is an adviser to STJ, a specialist financial advisory firm. On the policy side, Jones has served on a European Commission experts’ panel examining the role of investment analysts . Jones’s interest in pension funds is borne of his own experience as both a pension fund trustee and as an independent adviser to trustees. From 2004–11 he acted as Independent Adviser to the Trustees of The London Borough of Haringey Pension Fund.

Jones is active in connecting the School with practitioners. He organizes an annual series of Finance Practitioner lectures, which allows MBA and MFE students to share their views with senior decision makers and opinion formers from the financial services sector. Jones is also Chair of the Saïd Global Entrepreneur Network (SGEN), an organisation that allows current students, alumni and faculty members at Saïd Business School to connect with entrepreneurs worldwide. SGEN runs an annual business plan competition in which current and former Saïd Business School students act as mentors to short-listed teams, after which the finalists and their mentors present their plans to a ‘Dragon’s Den’ panel of entrepreneurs.