In 1998, he was granted a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin Graduate School of Business. His dissertation research centered on the choice of financial derivative contracts for use by non-financial corporations as risk management tools. Other research interests include computational finance, derivative pricing theory, and investor sentiment.
Prof. Brown is on the faculty of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has taught corporate finance and seminars on financial derivatives. Currently, he teaches macroeconomics in the MBA and EMBA core curriculum.
He has consulted for money management firms, software developers, and Fortune 500 companies on various aspects of financial risk management. His research has been presented at meetings of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Financial Management Association, the International Association of Financial Engineers, the Chicago Board of Trade, and the Annual Conference on Derivatives as well as numerous research universities. Prof. Brown has published in leading academic and practitioner finance journals such as The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, The Review of Financial Studies, The Journal of Business, The Journal of Derivatives, Financial Analyst Journal, and RISK. He is also the co-editor (with Donald Chew) of Corporate Risk: Strategies and Management (Risk Publications) and an associate editor of the online journal FMA-Online.