Sharier Azim Khan, Ph.D., CFA

Assistant Professor of Finance

Sharier Azim Khan's teaching experience started in the year 2001 when he accepted a part-time high school teaching position while he was just an undergraduate student. Ever since that first experience, teaching has been Dr. Khan's passion. After obtaining his undergraduate degree in business in 2005, Dr. Khan started his career in the banking industry. While working as a full-time banker, he took part in the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program and became a CFA charter holder in 2014. Although, Dr. Khan spent more than nine years in the banking industry, he always knew that he would return to teaching. To teach at the university level, Dr. Khan began the doctoral program at Texas Tech University in 2015. His nine-year banking experience and knowledge gained from the CFA program greatly helped Dr. Khan during his university teaching experiences at Texas Tech University and at the University of Central Oklahoma. His teaching interests include undergraduate and graduate corporate finance, investments, and financial institutions courses.

A Conversation with Sharier Azim Khan

What has been your favorite course to teach?

My teaching philosophy is to ensure that students can relate what they learn in class to the real world. I explain to the students that textbook theories work only under certain assumptions and may not work in practice if those assumptions are not satisfied. While teaching the Investments course, I frequently refer to my own experience as a former banker. Such references not only help students to understand how theory is applied into practice but also help to draw attention in class. I try to focus on what students need. Hence, the task gets complicated as each student may have a different need. This is particularly critical for a typical finance course. A finance course usually requires background knowledge from other fields like accounting, economics, mathematics and statistics. A typical classroom will have students with varying levels of knowledge in these other fields. As an example, on a topic like portfolio management, some students understand the mathematics well but have little insight on the economics behind it while some others may understand the economic concept well but struggle with the mathematics content. As a teacher of finance, I try to balance the lecture materials in a way so that students with different backgrounds can learn together. I frequently refer to online resources like the Investopedia and relevant video tutorials on YouTube. I strongly recommend students to work on the assignments in groups of students with different backgrounds in each group. This creates synergy in the group as students with different skills can contribute to the group and they can learn from each other.

Tell us about a project you are currently working on or recently completed.

My research philosophy is to explore how financial decisions are interlinked and study them as being interdependent and explore how those decisions affect firms and the economy in aggregate. Currently, I am working on a paper titled “Payout Flexibility and Firm Innovation” that explores how payout decisions affect firm-level innovation. I show that firms with greater flexibility in payout decisions have higher levels of innovation and have better quality innovations. Using a Granger-Causality framework, I show that firm innovation has no significant effect on payout flexibility while payout flexibility results in firm innovation. Additionally, I show that firms with greater payout flexibility show higher levels of R&D smoothing and their R&D smoothing is less affected by financing deficits.

Education

• Higher Education Teaching Certificate, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2024
• Ph.D., Finance, Texas Tech University, Rawls College of Business, Lubbock, TX, 2020
• Chartered Financial Analyst [CFA] Charterholder, CFA Institute, Charlottesville, VA, 2014
• B.B.A., Finance, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2005

Experience

• Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University-Commerce, 2022 – Present
• Assistant Professor, University of Central Oklahoma, 2020 – 2022
• Graduate Part-time Instructor, Texas Tech University, 2017 – 2020

Awards and Honors

• Doctoral Student Excellence in Teaching, Texas Tech University, 2018

Research Interests

• Corporate Finance

Professional Organizations

CFA Society Dallas/Fort Worth

Related Courses

• FIN 304: Intro Business Finance
• FIN 400: Principles of Investments
• FIN 410: Analysis of Fin Derivatives

Selected Publications

• Azim Khan, S. [2024]. Leverage Target and R&D Spending. Review of Financial Economics, 42(1), 93-105. https://doi.org/10.1002/rfe.1189
• Azim Khan, S. [2023]. Leverage Target and Firm Innovation. Managerial Finance. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4327037
• Azim Khan, S. [2021]. Leverage Target and Payout Policy. Journal of Financial Research, 44(1), 53-79. https://doi.org/10.1111/jfir.12234