International finance professor Robert Connolly is an award-winning teacher and researcher whose interests include international finance, international trade and financial markets.

His current work focuses on the impact of stock market uncertainty on co-movement of stock and bond returns across the globe, information vs. herding as explanations of cross-market equity return co-movement, and explanations and models of asset return and trading volume persistence in world capital markets.

Along with a former PhD student, his work won the Best Investments Paper award at the Global Finance Conference in 2000. Dr. Connolly and two colleagues in the UNC-Chapel Hill Economics Department received funding from The Sloan Foundation for a joint research project on the economics and finances of the U.S. textile and apparel industries. Dr. Connolly has been named a Senior Research Fellow of the UNC-Chapel Center for the Study of the American South, where he helps to direct a major research effort focused on the impact of globalization on industry in the U.S. South.

Dr. Connolly has taught in professional finance programs since 1988. He has led seminars in financial management for HR executives, real options analysis for Monsanto and Novartis, international finance and strategy for executives at Allergan, Inc., and conducted the finance section of the Burroughs-Wellcome Management Institute for four years. He also has led seminars on capital markets for the American Mortgage Bankers Association, the American Financial Services Academy and the Bank Administration Institute.

He received his PhD, MA and BA from the University of Maryland.