International Programs
I was granted a short-term faculty exchange at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. The University is an official participating institution in the University of Montana faculty exchange program. The University has two beautiful campuses, the main
campus and the downtown campus, both located in Santiago . Both campuses are located adjacent to the subway system, so I lived in an apartment in Downtown Santiago and took the subway to the main campus each day. Santiago is a large bustling metropolis with all the amenities of a world class city, but it also rests at the base of the Andes mountains so you can easily escape the big city life for a day of hiking or high-altitude powder skiing. The Pacific Ocean is around two hours to the west.
I am an Assistant Professor of Finance in the School of Business Administration at the University of Montana. One of the areas I specialize in is the behavior of stock prices before and after a dividend is distributed to shareholders. The day when dividends are distributed is called the ex-dividend day. In an efficient market stock prices should decrease by exactly the dividend amount on the ex-dividend date. For example, a firm that trades for $10 and distributes a $1 dividend should theoretically fall in price to $9. However, prior empirical research shows that stock prices, on average, do not drop by the full dividend amount. This phenomenon is known as the ex-dividend day anomaly. I have two papers published in this area in the Journal of Financial Research (JFR) and in the Journal of Financial Economics (JFE).These papers specifically examine U.S. ex-dividend data. I also have a working paper that uses Canadian ex-dividend data.
Santiago is the main financial hub for Chile, home to the Bolsa de Comercio, also known as the Santiago Stock Exchange. While visiting Chile I collaborated with Dr. Augusto Castillo on a working paper that examines the ex-dividend day behavior of stocks on the Santiago stock exchange. We were invited on a private tour of the Santiago stock exchange so that we could learn about the taxes and structural differences between the Santiago exchange and U.S. trading systems such as the NYSE and the NASDAQ. We are now using data from the Santiago stock exchange to test whether taxes or market-microstructure plays a role in the behavior of stock prices on the ex-dividend day in the Santiago market. Please feel free to contact me at keith.jakob@business.umt.edu if you would like to look at our current working paper.
On the weekends and holidays I spent time traveling around in the mountains that surround Santiago. Other than academic research the real highlights of my trip 
were:
