Heather E. Tookes

Heather Tookes has been on the faculty of Yale School of Management since 2004. She earned her PhD in Finance at Cornell and her BA in Economics at Brown.

Professor Tookes’ research lies at the intersection of capital markets and corporate finance. Much of her work focuses on understanding the ways in which credit market frictions interact with firms’ financing decisions. She has a particular interest in credit default swap and convertible bond markets. She has also studied trader borrowing and has linked margin trading to the sharp declines in stock market liquidity that occur during crises. Recently, she has written a series of papers investigating a range of topics related to COVID-19, including the effectiveness of business restrictions and the impact of the pandemic on the academic finance profession. She teaches Corporate Finance to MBA and Executive MBA students and has won awards for her teaching. Professor Tookes is a member of the FINRA Economic Advisory Committee and the Committee on Racial Diversity (CORD) of the American Finance Association. She previously served as Chair of the Academic Female Advisory Committee (AFFECT) of the American Finance Association. Professor Tookes has served on a variety of nonprofit, private and public boards.