Thomas Noe

Thomas's main areas of research fall within corporate finance and corporate governance.

Specifically, this research focuses on developing and experimentally validating rational choice models of financing, investment, governance, and management compensation. Much of Thomas's work relates to the problem of designing incentive, control and contact systems, to maximise shareholder value, or to the effect of actual financial and managerial contract structures on corporate value.

View Thomas's research.

Thomas engages with practitioners and policymakers and the broader academic community in a number of ways. 

He has consulted with a number of organisations such as the Federal Reserve Bank and Mirant Corporation. He has lectured widely to industry conferences including, for example DZ bank conference and has delivered keynote addresses for gatherings such as the 50 Anniversary Finance Conference at IIM-Calcutta and the 3rd Annual Singapore International Finance conference at the National University of Singapore.

He is the associate editor of a number of leading academic journals including Financial Management, The Review of Corporate Finance Studies and, in addition, serves as a co-editor of the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy. He also serves on the conference organising committees of the leading research conferences on corporate finance, both in North America (Western Finance and American Finance), Europe (Paris Spring Conference), and Asia (Singapore International Conference).

Over the span of his career, he has taught and researched at institutions on five continents, including the Federal Reserve Bank, Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, National University of Singapore, NTU, Singapore Management University, and IIM-Calcutta, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Auckland, Universidad de Chile, Universidad los Andes, and the University of Queensland.

Thomas has won a number of research awards, including at leading academic meetings in North America (Western Finance Association), Asia (China International Conference), and Australia (Australasian Finance and Banking Conference). 

Thomas is motivated by the desire to improve the practice of finance internationally and to increase the understanding of both practitioners and policy makers in the areas in which he works.

Thomas teaches on a range of programmes at the School.

He teaches Corporate Finance in the MSc in Financial Economics programme; Theory of Finance in the M.Phil Economics and D.Phil Finance programmes and also tutors Balliol college undergraduates in Finance and Financial Management.

The core model of financial economics lies at the centre of all Thomas' teaching. He believes it is the only logically consistent model for corporate financial decision-making that is simple enough to apply to practical capital budgeting decisions as it is founded on the trade-off between risk and return and rational arbitrage-free pricing of corporate securities.

At the same time, the core model does not reflect a number of important first order effects on financing policy, including collateral, asymmetric information, incentives, and the costs of financial distress. These factors are amenable to logical internally consistent economic modelling, but the resulting models are rarely of sufficient transparency to directly apply to real-world decisions. In teaching students about these topics he employs a much more interactive approach: working through the models and aiming to demonstrate as many practical insights as possible.

The students start with real-world decision problems and, through case analysis and class discussion, develop an appreciation of the role of theory in organising their analysis of these problems.