Faculty & Staff

Robert O. Edmister Professor Office: 200 Business Administration Phone:  (419) 372-0267 Email:  edmist@bgsu.edu Web Site: www.business.bgsu.edu/faculty_staff/edmister

Dr. Edmister is a professor of Finance, Bowling Green State University (Ohio) and was the Frank R. Day/MBA Chair of Banking and the Director of the Mississippi School of Banking at The University of Mississippi. He is a former practicing banker at the National Bank of Detroit, a noted academic at three major universities, and appointee to the FDIC and Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Edmister created the Bank Loan Simulation to provide bankers with an opportunity to experience realistic but dangerous lending conditions without endangering their banks. This simulation, used in banks and by the American Bankers Association Commercial Lending School, has saved banks substantial amounts in loan losses.  The simulation has been a core of the ABA school since 1989.

Dr. Edmister has been called on as a financial expert numerous times in his long career in the financial markets. The U.S. Air Force, through the Logistics Management Institute, used his expertise in the development of financial analysis capability for major weapons contracts; also, the model (DMFINCAP) he developed was later used by the U.S. Treasury Department to evaluate loan guarantees to Chrysler Corporation. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation called on Dr. Edmister to testify in bank and savings and loan cases with respect to industry standards and practice in business loan underwriting. Also, he has conducted business studies for The Student National Marketing Association (Sallie Mae), Suburban Bank, and many others.

Dr. Edmister holds a BS from the Miami University (Ohio), an MBA (finance) from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. (finance) from The Ohio State University. His Ph.D. dissertation, Multiple Discriminate Analysis for Small Business Failure Prediction (1970) was the first of its kind for evaluating new small businesses and preceded the application of multivariate statistical models that commercial banks in the United States are only now adopting.

He is an accomplished academic, having published in the most prestigious journals including The Journal of Finance. Topics on which he has published include commercial loan pricing, small firm investment analysis, working capital management, personnel management incentives, stock brokerage commissions, liquidity of small firm stock, bank commercial loan rates and availability, interest rates on residential mortgages, the term structure of interest rates, and the cost of trading stocks. He is biographed in Who’s Who in Education and the Harvard Business School Press International Directory of Business and Management Scholars.