Career
After receiving his PhD in Business Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Cole began his career in late 1987 as a financial economist at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, during the height of the savings & loan crisis. Here, he began a series of scholarly articles on the failures of thrift institutions, which he continued from 1989 - 1991 as a financial economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Cole returned to Washington in 1991 as a supervisory financial analyst in the Division of Banking Supervision & Regulation at the Federal Reserve Board where he led the development of SEER—the Fed's statistical early warning system for bank failures. [4] After completing development of SEER in 1993, Cole transferred to the Board's Division of Research & Statistics, where he was the co-principal investigator of the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finance. [5] In this position, he began what has become more than 25 years of research on the availability of credit to small firms. After completion of the survey in 1997, Cole spent one year as Chief Economist of the Employment Policies Institute in Washington D.C. before returning to academia as a professor of finance at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. After two year, Cole moved to Sydney, Australia to take a professorship at the University of New South Wales—One of Australia's most prestigious universities. He remained at UNSW until July 2003, when he moved back to the U.S. for a professorship at DePaul University in Chicago, where he remained until August 2016. In August 2016, he took his current position at FAU. Since leaving the Fed in 1997, Cole also began a second career as a special advisor to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank, providing training to central bankers primarily on issues related to banking supervision. In this capacity, he has led or participated in more than 70 international missions to central banks in more than 50 countries.
Cole is a prolific author who, according to Google Scholar, has written more than 100 articles that have been cited by other scholars more than 14,500 times [6] and more than 3,400 times according to Web of Science. [7] Cole's articles have appeared in such leading academic journals as The Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Review of Finance, the Journal of Financial Intermediation and the Journal of Corporate Finance. [8] He is best known for his works on agency costs & ownership structure, access to credit by small businesses, and bank failures. His research interests focus on corporate governance, entrepreneurship, financial institutions and real estate. [9] [10]
In addition to academic pursuits, Cole has been a frequent commentator in the media about the Covid-19 pandemic. [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17]
He was a co-developer of a popular Covid-19 tracker website for the state of Florida, which provided comprehensive and intuitive charts on Florid Covid-19 testing, hospitalizations and deaths during 2020 - 2021. [18] [19] [20]
More recently, Cole developed The Banking Initiative at Florida Atlantic University [21] This website provides information on large banks with high risk factors, such as exposure to commercial real estate, unrealized losses on investment securities and exposures to uninsured deposits. Cole posts much of this information about bank risk on the social media platform LinkedIn, where he has more than 14,000 followers. [22]
Cole also has been an active commentator in the media. During his career, he has been interviewed for and cited in stories in the Wall Street Journal, [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] the Financial Times, [29] [30] the New York Times, [31] [32] the Washington Post, [33] [34] Reuters, [35] [36] [37] [38] Forbes Magazine, [39] [40] [41] the American Banker, [42] Bloomberg, [43] [44] the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, NPR's All Things Considered, [45] Voice of America News, the Washington Times, and Yahoo Finance.
He has appeared in television interviews on CNN, [46] First Business News, Fox Business News, [47] the PBS Nightly Business Report, NBC's Today Show, as well as on local Chicago and Florida stations. [48] [49]
