UD’s Elson among 100 most influential people in finance

Charles Elson

3:19 p.m., June 24, 2004--A professor in the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics has been selected as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Finance for the second consecutive year by Treasury and Risk Management magazine.

Charles Elson, Edgar S. Woolard Jr. Chair and director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance, is included on the prestigious list, which appears in the magazine’s June 2004 issue. Also on the list are Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the chief financial officers of several major corporations, including Xerox, McDonald’s, General Motors and Wachovia.

Elson is listed among the practical theoreticians, or those academics who have taken their teachings to the marketplace. “He is a leading voice and adviser on corporate governance and serves on four boards,” the magazine said.

The other three academics saluted as practical theoreticians are Mark Rubinstein of the University of California at Berkeley, Rene Stulz of Ohio State University and Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School.

In 2003, Elson was one of six academics named to the list.

The magazine noted that to be included candidates must have some kind of immediate influence, either as a thought leader, service provider or advocate upon its readership of chief financial officers, treasurers, controllers and other senior finance executives.

A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Virginia Law School, Elson served as a professor at the Stetson University College of Law in St. Petersburg, Fla., before joining the UD faculty in 2000. He has served on several corporate boards of directors and has written extensively on corporate governance issues for scholarly publications and the popular press. In 2002, Elson testified before the U.S. Senate on the role of the board of directors in the collapse of the Enron Corp., and in the last two years he has been a panelist or speaker at dozens of conferences and seminars.

The Weinberg Center plays an important part in the college’s undergraduate experience through a course on advanced corporate governance, which is taught by Elson and features panel discussions by some of the nation’s leading executives, lawyers, academics, journalists and judges. One such session in November 2003 featured an historic meeting between federal Securities and Exchange Commission members and the Delaware judiciary.

E-mail this article

To learn how to subscribe to UDaily, click here.