Dr. James Kolari has taught financial markets and institutions at Texas A&M University and been active in international education, consulting and executive education. In 1994 he was awarded the J.P. Morgan Chase Professorship in Finance in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M. Prior to this, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Helsinki and worked with the Bank of Finland. Dr. Kolari has served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and as a faculty fellow with the Mortgage Bankers Association of America. In addition, he has consulted for the U.S. Small Business Administration, American Bankers Association, Independent Bankers Association of America and the U.S. Information Agency. In recent years he has worked as a senior research fellow at the Swedish School of Business and Economics (Hanken) in Finland. Previously, he served as an advisor on the North American Free Trade Agreement for the State of Texas; he was a consultant for the Mexican government in financing technology; and he served as a member of the Academy of Sciences for Higher Education in Russia. With more than 100 articles in refereed journals, numerous other papers and monographs, more than 20 co-authored books and more than 100 competitive papers presented at academic conferences, he ranks in the top 1-2% of finance scholars in the U.S., according to recent guides of research productivity among finance professors. His papers have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Business, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Journal of Financial Research, Journal of Banking and Finance, Real Estate Economics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control and the Scandinavian Journal of Economics. His work has been published in Russian, Finnish, Dutch, Italian and Chinese.