James A. Wilcox is a Professor at the Haas School of Business and a member of the Haas Finance Group. After a period as Chief Economist for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington DC, Professor Wilcox returned for his 22nd year at Haas to pursue his interests in Banking, Mergers and Acquisitions, Federal Reserve Monetary Policy and Conversions.

His recent work includes a study of the effect of interest rate changes on Bank Lending. Everybody believes that Monetary Policy can have some effect on the economy.  An important question is how does Monetary Policy work and when does it work. Professor Wilcox is researching the response of bank lending to changes in interest rates. His research attempts to quantify lending behavior as a function of time as interest rates are varied (J Curve). Professor Wilcox seeks to answer the question: What does the “J curve” for bank lending really look like?

Another area of his research is conversions. There are some financial companies and large insurance companies that are owned by customers. Credit unions are an example. Some like Prudential have recently converted to regular publicly owned companies. What happens here is that a company originally owned by its customers goes public and when they convert, the original net worth goes not to the original customers, but to the shareholders. A customer has a legal right to claim a portion of the company's net worth, but the process is complicated and customers are rarely aware of what is going on. In his research, Professor Wilcox seeks to answer the question: What kind of return would a customer get if he participated in the conversion? This research is important because it quantifies a well-known fact about conversions and gives us an idea of how much these customers lose when conversions take place.

Professor Wilcox relies on publicly available data for the majority of his research. The data is made available by banks and other financial institutions. There is also a lot of information available on the web on government web site and freelunch.com. Freelunch.com is a website based on the underlying economic idea that "There is no free lunch." A bunch of economists got together and posted a variety of data sources on the web as a "free lunch" to anybody interested. Sometimes Professor Wilcox will conduct his own surveys to collect data if public data is not available.