For the first time in years, a professor at a French school of higher education is among the five most widely cited economics and management professors in the world.

EDHEC's Florencio López de Silanes takes second place in the 2008 edition of the ScienceWatch rankings of management and economics professors by the number of citations of their work in academic journals.

These rankings are the benchmark for the international academic community: they are drawn up by Thomson Reuters and are based on an analysis of 11,000 academic journals, 10 million articles, and a 10-year cycle of publications.

Florencio López de Silanes is head of a new research programme on regulation and mutual fund governance at the EDHEC Risk and Asset Management Research Centre. He has a doctorate in economics from Harvard. Before coming to EDHEC, he taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Amsterdam, as well as at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Professor López de Silanes's research interests revolve around corporate governance, international corporate finance, market finance, the competitiveness of legal systems, and privatisation. He has advised governments, international organisations, and businesses on these issues.

His work has appeared in the major international financial and economics journals and he has recently written two books on investor protection and corporate governance, as well as on the positive results of privatisations in Latin America.

[More : http://sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/08/may4-08_4 ]