Cornerstone Research Named Outstanding Global Economic Firm

Pierre Collin-Dufresne

Professor of Finance,
Swiss Finance Institute,
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Pierre Collin-Dufresne is an expert in international financial markets, with an emphasis on asset allocation and pricing, risk management, and market microstructure. Professor Collin-Dufresne consults to the European Central Bank, as part of the Bank’s Directorate of General Research, and formerly held a visiting appointment at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He has served on the advisory research boards of Moody’s, INQUIRE Europe, Kepos Capital, and Lombard Odier Asset Management. As an expert witness, Professor Collin-Dufresne has provided expert testimony in matters involving investment banking, valuation, and fixed-income securities and derivatives.

In his research, Professor Collin-Dufresne studies topics related to credit risk, fixed-income securities, credit and equity markets, asset allocation, securitization, emerging markets, and international finance. He has analyzed trading behaviors and assessed their impact on market liquidity, price volatility, and firm value. Professor Collin-Dufresne has twice been awarded the Journal of Finance’s Amundi Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize for his work on the connections between market dynamics, trading activity, and stock prices, as well as for research on securitization.

Professor Collin-Dufresne’s research has been published in leading academic journals, including Econometrica, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, and the Review of Financial Studies. A coeditor of Finance and Stochastics, he also serves as associate editor of the International Journal of Central Banking, European Financial Management, and Mathematical Finance. Professor Collin-Dufresne was a director of the American Finance Association and the Western Finance Association. He is a research fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and a former research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

At the Swiss Finance Institute, Professor Collin-Dufresne has taught courses in asset pricing, investments, and credit derivatives. Previously, he was the Carson Family Chair Professor at Columbia Business School, and held professorships at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining the faculty at Columbia, Professor Collin-Dufresne was a senior portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, responsible for fixed-income and credit strategies in the Quantitative Strategies Group.

Andrew Sweeting

Professor, Department of Economics,
University of Maryland, College Park;
Former Director, Bureau of Economics,
U.S. Federal Trade Commission

Andrew Sweeting is a former director of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) Bureau of Economics. An industrial organization economist, Professor Sweeting specializes in competition and antitrust, including merger analysis, applied econometrics, and structural modeling.

While at the FTC, Professor Sweeting oversaw many merger investigations conducted by the Agency, and was director when the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines were released. He was also involved in high-profile consumer protection investigations, including several related to digital platforms and data security. In addition to his tenure at the FTC, Professor Sweeting has served as an academic visitor at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Economic Analysis Group, and as an expert on the Academic Panel of the U.K. Competition Commission (now the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority).

Global Competition Review recognized Professor Sweeting to its inaugural list of the world’s most important antitrust academics. His wide-ranging research has analyzed the impact of mergers on prices, product variety, and product repositioning. He has also addressed collusion in wholesale electricity markets, the performance of different auction designs, dynamic pricing in online resale markets, and the effects of alternative copyright policies in the radio industry. In addition, he has researched the effect of government bailouts, how targeted advertising affects market structure and competition, and firms’ strategic use of pricing and capacity choices to influence future competition.

Professor Sweeting has conducted empirical research in a range of industries, including radio, television, advertising, consumer packaged goods, energy markets, online resale markets, transportation, and government procurement and timber auctions.

A widely published author, Professor Sweeting’s work has appeared in leading economics journals, such as Econometrica, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the RAND Journal of Economics. He has been awarded several multiyear research grants from the National Science Foundation. In 2018, he received the Robert F. Lanzillotti Prize for the best paper in antitrust economics for a coauthored article on post-merger repositioning in the airline industry.

Professor Sweeting is a former editor of the Journal of Industrial Economics and a former foreign editor of the Review of Economic Studies. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

In his more than two decades as an educator, Professor Sweeting has been honored numerous times for excellence in teaching. Before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland, he held positions at Duke University, Northwestern University, and St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Liam Colley

Senior Vice President

Liam Colley heads Cornerstone Research’s European competition practice. Mr. Colley is a testifying economics expert specializing in competition, antitrust damages, and economic regulation issues. He has more than twenty-five years of experience as a consultant and testifying expert. His experience includes multiple high-profile matters before U.K. and European Union courts and competition regulators. Citing the “unassailable quality of his work,” Who’s Who Legal has named Mr. Colley a leading competition economist, as well as a Thought Leader and Global Leader in the competition field.

Antitrust and competition

Mr. Colley has consulted on a range of competition matters before the European Commission, national competition authorities, regulators, and courts. His expertise includes matters arising in automotive; financial services; insurance; technology, media, and telecom (TMT); and transportation. He has supported clients on numerous antitrust investigations and market inquiries. In addition, Mr. Colley has worked on multiple mergers, particularly on matters involving efficiencies and failing firm defenses.

Antitrust damages

Mr. Colley has wide experience estimating damages that arise from breaches of competition rules. In cartel damages matters, he has prepared numerous expert reports in the context of high court litigation, arbitration, mediation, and settlement negotiations. He has addressed class action issues and worked on many stand-alone and follow-on actions in abuse of dominance cases.

Mr. Colley has served as a testifying expert before the U.K. High Court and the U.K. Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) on both antitrust damages matters and regulatory appeals.

Mr. Colley publishes and speaks widely on competition and damages issues. Before joining Cornerstone Research, for many years he led the global economics practice of a major professional consulting firm.