Dr. Elizabeth S. Cooperman is Professor Emerita of Finance and Lecturer in Finance at the University of Colorado Denver Business School, where she taught from 1996 until she took emerita status in autumn 2018 and has continued teaching since. She holds a Ph.D. in Finance and an M.B.A. from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Denver, and a B.A. in Psychology from Tulane University's Newcomb College . Before Denver she taught at Bowling Green State University from 1984 to 1988 and at the University of Baltimore from 1988 to 1996, where she was tenured in 1992 and held the Frank Baker Research Chair; she joined CU Denver in 1996, was tenured in 1999, and was promoted to full professor in July 2010 .
Her administrative record at the Business School is unusually broad for a finance academic. She served as Finance Discipline Director and M.S. Finance Director from 2000 to 2005, as MBA Program Director from 2005 to 2011, as Co-Director of the Managing for Sustainability program from 2007, as Interim Primary Unit Director for a year in 2015–16, and as Chair of the Dean's Council of Directors in 2006–07 . Teaching and service recognition followed the same pattern: Outstanding Teacher Awards in 2009 and 2018, Outstanding Service Awards in 2004 and 2016, and the Laube Community Impact Award as part of the Managing for Sustainability team in 2015 .
Her research has run on two tracks that rarely meet in one scholar. The first is the empirical study of financial institutions: thrift and S&L operating efficiency, risk-taking and regulatory closure; the effect of director tenure and independence on bank CEO compensation; and the valuation of surplus deferred compensation in public defined-benefit pension plans, written with Michael Mannino in the *Journal of Pension Economics and Finance* in 2009 and 2011 and covered in the Colorado press for what it revealed about Colorado PERA and the Denver Public Schools retirement system . The second is sustainability and climate finance: corporate carbon reduction targets, the returns to announcements of the Toxic 100 index, shareholder resolutions on environmental health, the 'carbon bubble' and divestment, and a 2022 *IRABF* paper on whether US banks have kept their climate promises . Her work has appeared in the *Journal of Finance*, the *Review of Economics and Statistics*, *Financial Management*, *The Financial Review*, the *Journal of Financial Research*, the *Journal of Financial Services Research*, *Real Estate Economics*, the *Journal of Sustainable Finance and Investment* and *Managerial Finance* .
Her *Managing Financial Institutions: Markets and Sustainable Finance* (Routledge, 2017) is the latest in a line of editions she has authored since the Gardner and Mills text, and it deliberately moves beyond the mathematical risk-modelling focus of conventional textbooks to ask what role financial institutions play in advancing social and economic goals in their communities . With Fred Andreas, Blair Gifford and Graham Russell she co-edited *A Simple Path to Sustainability* (Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2011). She has been co-editor of the *International Review of Accounting, Banking and Finance* since 2008 and has served on the editorial boards of the *Journal of Economics and Finance* and *Financial Decisions* since 1998 . She was President of the Midwest Finance Association in 2001–02 after serving as its Vice President of Membership and as Vice President and Program Chair, remains on its Past-Presidents Advisory Council, and served as a financial economist member of the Maryland State Banking Board from 1994 to 1996 .
Dr. Cooperman's career has a coherence that is easy to miss because it spans two literatures. The thrift and bank studies of the 1990s asked how ownership structure, charter value and regulatory regime shaped risk-taking — and they were written while the savings-and-loan crisis was still being resolved, which is to say she was measuring a live problem rather than reconstructing one. The later sustainability work asks a structurally similar question about a different industry: do firms' stated commitments match their measured behaviour? Her 2022 paper on whether US banks kept their climate promises is the same instinct applied to a new set of disclosures.
The pension research is the part of her record with the clearest public consequence. With Michael Mannino she documented a large gap between the state's valuation of retiree defined-benefit obligations and a private-sector valuation, work that drew coverage in Colorado and speaks directly to the underfunding problems now confronting public plans across the country. That is applied finance doing what applied finance should: producing a number that changes an argument.
Manuscripts in banking and sustainable finance fail for identifiable reasons: the identification strategy cannot separate the effect of interest from the effect of selection, the sample is too small or too convenient for the claim, or a sustainability measure is adopted without asking whether it tracks the outcome it is supposed to represent. Dr. Cooperman has spent three decades building and testing exactly those measures, and she brings that discipline to the manuscripts APC reviews.
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