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Will Gerken studies the people who give financial advice: who they are, when they behave badly and what investors and regulators can do about it. He is the Real Estate Endowed Professor of Finance at the Gatton College of Business and Economics and director of the University of Kentucky's Undergraduate Certificate in Financial Planning, a CFP Board-registered program with more than 190 students. He holds the University Research Professor designation for 2025–26.
Much of his research begins with data that others have overlooked. He and his coauthors build evidence out of regulatory filings, FOIA requests and other public records then use it to study how information moves through financial markets and who bears the cost when it does not reach everyone. That work runs from the advisers and brokers households hire, to the analysts and fund managers who trade on what they know to the regulators watching both: whether misconduct spreads from one adviser to a coworker, how much an analyst half a country away really knows about a firm and what a visit from the SEC signals about the company being visited.
His research appears in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science and he is an associate editor of the Journal of Corporate Finance. His findings have been covered by the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Bloomberg and NPR's Marketplace and an SEC commissioner cited his work in a statement on the agency's rules governing investment advice.
He holds the CFA charter and is a CFP® professional and worked in the private client group at Smith Barney before earning his Ph.D. His interest in the subject is not abstract, he began this line of research after someone close to him was taken advantage of by an adviser who should have been caught sooner.
