Alexander Becker

Assistant Professor, Administrative Sciences

Dr. Becker is an assistant professor in the financial management program at Boston University’s Metropolitan College. He teaches courses in Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management, Derivative Securities and Markets, Case Studies in Current Corporate Financial Topics, and Interdisciplinary Methods for Quantitative Finance.

In his research, Dr. Becker works on complex networks in finance and empirical corporate finance. Currently, he is studying the impact of private debt and its covenants on the capital structure of firms and bank-firm lending relationships, firm-political risk, and the impact of stock buybacks.

Professor Becker holds a PhD in physics with a concentration in econophysics from Boston University. His doctoral thesis addresses the dynamics and interconnectedness of financial markets, such as the sovereign debt market and the foreign exchange market. He is a CFA® charterholder.

Research Interests

Courses

Scholarly Works

Working Papers

Alamir, A., Becker, A. P., and Julio, I. F. “Market Instability from Options Flow” (2024).

Becker, A. P., Julio, I. F., and Wen, J. “Managing Financial Flexibility: Firm-level Political Risk & the Speed of Adjustment” (2023).

Becker, A. P., Julio, I. F., Vodenska, I., and Wang, L. “The Asymmetric Impact of Covenant Tightness on Firm Capital Structure Adjustments” (2023).

Becker, A. P., Julio, I. F., Vodenska, I., and Wang, L. “Corporate leverage ratio adjustment under cash flow-based debt covenants” (2021).

Refereed Journal Articles

Vodenska, I., Dehmamy, D., Becker, A. P., Buldyrev S. V., and Havlin, S. “Systemic stress test model for shared portfolio networks.” Scientific Reports vol. 11, 3358 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82904-y

Vodenska, I., Aoyama, H., Becker, A. P., Fujiwara, Y., Iyetomi, H., and Lungu, E. “From stress testing to systemic stress testing: the importance of macroprudential regulation.” Journal of Financial Stability vol. 52, 100803 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfs.2020.100803

Kremer, M., Becker, A. P., Vodenska, I., Stanley, H. E., and Schäfer, R. “Economic and political effects on currency clustering dynamics.” Quantitative Finance 19, no. 5 (2019): 705–716. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697688.2018.1532101

Vodenska, I., Becker, A. P., Zhou, D., Kenett, D. Y., Stanley, H. E., and Havlin, S. “Community Analysis of Global Financial Markets.” Risks 4, no. 2 (2016): 13. https://doi.org/10.3390/risks4020013

Book Chapters

Vodenska, I., and Becker, A. P. “Interdependence, Vulnerability and contagion in Financial and Economic Networks.” In New Perspectives and Challenges in Econophysics and Sociophysics, edited by Frédéric Abergel, Bikas K. Chakrabarti, Anirban Chakraborti, Nivedita Deo, and Kiran Sharma (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019): 101–116.

Select Conference Presentations

“Market Instability from Options Flow.” World Finance and Banking Symposium, Vilnius, Lithuania, December 2023.

“The Asymmetric Impact of Covenant Tightness on Firm Capital Structure Adjustments.” FMA Annual Meeting 2023, Chicago, Ill., October 2023.

“The Asymmetric Impact of Covenant Tightness on Firm Capital Structure Adjustments.” 2023 EFA Annual Meeting, Amsterdam, Netherlands, October 2023.

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