Tyson Van Alfen

Sykes College of Business · University of Tampa · Tampa, FL 33606 · (813) 253-6221 · TVanAlfen@ut.edu

I am an Assistant Professor of Finance in the Sykes College of Business at the University of Tampa. My areas of research include financial advisors, reputation, misconduct, and product markets. I have experience teaching a variety of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level.


Academic Appointments

University of Tampa

Assistant Professor of Finance
2024 - Present

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Assistant Professor of Finance & Analytics
2019 - 2024

Education

University of Kentucky

Ph.D. in Finance
2019

Utah State University

M.S. in Financial Economics
2013

Utah State University

B.S. in Finance & Economics
2012

Research

Real Estate Shocks and Financial Advisor Misconduct

With Stephen Dimmock and William Gerken

Journal of Finance (2021)

We test whether personal real estate shocks affect professional misconduct by financial advisors. We use a panel of advisors' home addresses and examine within-advisor variation relative to other advisors who work at the same firm and live in the same ZIP code. We find a negative relation between housing returns and misconduct. We show that advisors' housing returns explain misconduct against out-of-state customers, breaking the link between customer and advisor housing shocks. Furthermore, the results are stronger for advisors with lower career risk from committing misconduct, and for advisors with greater borrowing constraints.

Dual Ownership as a Market Solution to Risk Shifting: Evidence from Loan Covenant Violations

With Steven Irlbeck and Eric McKee

Working Paper

We examine the the choices of creditors to simultaneously hold equity in the same underlying firm and posit that creditors may become "dual holders" as a rational response to heightened asset substitution risk. We find that, following a firm's violation of a covenant, creditors increase their equity position relative to other owners. This effect persists several quarters into the future and is concentrated among lenders and not bond holders. We also find that bond holders who also own equity reduce their bond exposure following violations. We do not see a similar effect for bond holders that do not own equity, suggesting a strategic reallocation for dual holders.

Managerial Myopia and Product Market Reputation: Evidence from Amazon.com Reviews

Working Paper

Using a novel dataset of customer reviews from Amazon.com, I study the impact of managerial myopia on product market reputation. Using exogenous variation due to the timing of CEO equity vesting events, I show that short-term incentive shocks predict declines in reputation. A changing product market lineup and a deterioration of existing products are two mechanisms through which reputation is affected. The effect is larger when the CEO has other short-term concerns and when the firm has a low reputation in the product market. However, higher advertising expenses mitigate the negative reputational effect among consumers. Using an alternative empirical methodology, I find that higher short-term ownership in the firm is also associated with declining product market reputation, while higher long-term ownership is associated with increasing reputation.

Political Transactions Around Company Filings

With Guitao Wen

Work in Progress


Teaching

Investments

FIN 440 — University of Tampa — 2024

Undergraduate

Financial Markets, Institutions, and Money

FIN 470 — University of Tampa — 2024

Undergraduate

Information Visualization

BSAN 406 — Southern Illinois — 2022–2024

Undergraduate

Security Valuation

FIN 469 & BA 536 — Southern Illinois — 2019–2024

Undergraduate MBA

Working Capital Management

FIN 462 — Southern Illinois — 2019–2023

Undergraduate

Corporate Finance Seminar I

BA 539A — Southern Illinois — 2021, 2023

PhD

Investment Analysis

FIN 410 — Kentucky — 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018

Undergraduate

Introduction to Microeconomics

ECN 2010 — Utah State — 2013

Undergraduate

Applied Econometrics

ECN 6330 — Utah State — 2013

MBA

Other Instructional Seminars

Introduction to web scraping with python
  • Southern Illinois University Carbondale — 2019
  • University of Kentucky — 2015, 2019
Presentations with RevealJS
  • University of Kentucky — 2019

Technical

Stata Packages

I am the author of two Stata packages:

recol

This program dynamically resizes columns in Stata's data browser. It's annoying when you are viewing your data and either the variable names or column contents are truncated. Sure, you could manually determine the appropriate widths and format the appropriate variables each time. Or you could just run recol.

Since its release in Feb 2022, this package has been downloaded ~2,000 times.

To install:

ssc install recol
sicff

This program converts numeric SIC codes to any of the Fama French industries. I'm sure many of us have those obnoxious lines of code to do this somewhere, but this should de-clutter your Stata code. See Ken French's data library for details on the industry portfolios.

Since its release in July 2017, this package has been downloaded ~25,000 times.

To install:

ssc install sicff

Python Tutorial

I created this tutorial primarily for my students. It is a work in progress that I update regularly. There are many other Python tutorials out there that are admittedly higher quality and more comprehensive (e.g., Python.org and W3Schools). This tutorial, however, has a more narrow focus — finance and analytics applications — and a target audience of finance undergraduate students.