About

Professor Michael Imerman is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Finance Area at the Paul Merage School of Business, UC Irvine. He is also the Faculty Director for the Master of Finance (MFin) Program. He holds a Ph.D. and a B.S. in Finance from Rutgers University. Prior to his current position, he was an Associate Professor of Finance at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University and served as Co-Director of the Financial Engineering program. He has also taught at Lehigh University and Rutgers Business School, and completed an NSF-funded postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University in the Operations Research and Financial Engineering department, where he researched big data analytics and financial data science. Professor Imerman's areas of expertise include banking, risk management, credit risk models, financial regulation, financial data science, and FinTech innovation. He is recognized as an expert in FinTech innovation and is in the final stages of writing a book titled 'The Economics of FinTech,' to be published by MIT Press. He spent a sabbatical with the FinTech Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from January to May 2022. Additionally, he regularly advises and consults for companies ranging from large financial institutions to startups. He serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Financial Data Science and was previously an associate editor for the Journal of Risk Finance. His research has been published in prominent journals such as the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Journal of Banking & Finance, and Stochastic Processes and their Applications. At Merage, he teaches courses on Financial Institutions, Venture Capital and Private Equity, and Applied Machine Learning, among others. Before his academic career, he worked as an analyst supporting high-grade corporate bond and credit derivatives traders on Wall Street.

Research topics

• Business
• Finance
• Industrial organization
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Knowledge management
• Ecology

Selected publications

• Interview with Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management

  The Journal of Private Markets Investing · 2026-02-27

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Editor’s Letter

  The Journal of Private Markets Investing · 2026-03-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Interview with Richard Ennis, cofounder of EnnisKnupp and former editor of Financial Analysts Journal

  The Journal of Private Markets Investing · 2026-05-23

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Platforms, Portals, and Private Markets: A Structural Economics of Name, Image, and Likeness

  The Journal of Private Markets Investing · 2026-02-25

  articleSenior author

  Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rights are commonly framed as a labor-market reform that compensates college athletes for previously unpaid work. This article advances a different interpretation of NIL, as a platform-mediated private market for intangible athlete assets rather than a wage-setting system. NIL compensation reflects negotiated valuations of identity-based, illiquid assets shaped by exposure, narrative, and institutional context. The NCAA transfer portal functions as the central repricing mechanism, transforming latent valuations into contestable negotiations through episodic information revelation. Drawing on private market economics, platform theory, incomplete contracting, and real options logic, we explain why volatility, frequent renegotiation, and compensation dispersion are structural features rather than transitional failures. By viewing NIL within this context, we identify several policy implications, including the role of portal access rules in regulating the frequency of valuation resets, the importance of platform design and transparency in shaping information flow, and the difficulty of applying labor-market regulation to platform-mediated private markets.

  PublisherDOI

• Voluntary disclosures and climate change uncertainty: Evidence from CDS premiums

  Journal of Corporate Finance · 2025-06-24 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Entrepreneurial Finance of Fintech Firms and the Effect of Investments in Fintech Startups on the Performance of Corporate Investors

  Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis · 2025-11-13

  articleOpen access

  Abstract We analyze how corporate direct investments in fintech startups affect startup performance and that of investing firms. Corporate investment in fintech startups is associated with a greater likelihood of successful exit, more and higher-quality innovation, and a greater inflow of high-quality inventors. A stacked difference-in-differences analysis shows that direct investments enhance the operating performance and equity-market valuation of corporate investors in the financial services sector, but not those in the nonfinancial sector. We establish two channels that drive fintech startups’ performance improvements: strategic alliance formation between investors and startups, and enhanced startup monitoring by corporate investors.

  PublisherDOI

• Quantifying disruption in the age of AI: An AI-based approach to evaluating startup innovation and investment potential

  Finance research letters · 2025-05-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Editor’s Letter

  The Journal of Private Markets Investing · 2025-12-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• SPAC to Basics: A Monte Carlo Approach to Valuing De-SPAC Warrants with Path-Dependent Redemption Features

  The Journal of Derivatives · 2024-10-21

  article

  The authors introduce a Monte Carlo model to value de-SPAC warrants. These warrants contain path-dependent cumulative Parisian redemption features that are ignored by simpler valuation methods. The authors’ model prices basic de-SPAC warrants accurately, provides an upper bound for more complex warrants, and shows that the cumulative Parisian redemption features often have material impacts on warrant values. The authors offer a detailed description and sample code to implement and extend their procedure.

  PublisherDOI

• SPAC to Basics: A Monte Carlo Approach to Valuing De-SPAC Warrants with Path-Dependent Redemption Features

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Joseph R. Mason

  Louisiana State University

  6 shared

• N.K. Chidambaran

  University of Mons

  6 shared

• L. A. Shepp

  University of Pennsylvania

  5 shared

• Jianqing Fan

  4 shared

• Ben J. Sopranzetti

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  4 shared

• Wei Dai

  3 shared

• Hong Lee

  3 shared

• Philip Ernst

  3 shared