Profile
Christopher Stewart
Assistant Professor
Chicago Booth
Christopher Stewart’s research is a blend of accounting, corporate finance, and corporate law. He primarily studies firms’ economic responses to changes in regulation and law. For example, his work investigating the impact of strengthened appraisal laws in mergers and acquisitions has shown that target firms respond to heightened appraisal risk by withholding positive information, and that this effect is strongest when the target firm’s chief executive officer has future economic ties with the acquiring firm. His findings suggest that acquirer-provided incentives play a key role in determining managers’ disclosure strategies during mergers, and that retaining target managers can provide important benefits to acquirers in the form of control over the information environment.
Stewart received a BA in political science from Laurentian University, and earned MCom and PhD degrees in accounting from the University of Melbourne, Australia, where he was awarded the Peter Brownell Scholarship. He also studied accounting at Stanford University Graduate School of Business as a visiting PhD student. In addition, he holds an MBA in finance from Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada.