Kelvin Tan

Dr Tan is an Associate Professor in Finance at the UQ Business School.

Dr Tan has earned a reputation as a researcher with expertise in capital structure and corporate finance. His work has been published in leading academic and practitioner journals, such as Organization Science (Financial Times Top-50 (FT-50) Journal list, and UTD-24), Research Policy (FT-50), Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Nature Portfolio - Scientific Reports. Six of his papers have also been named as the Best Papers at the following five conferences: (1) the Asian Finance Association Conference, (2) the European Real Estate Society Conference, (3) the Western Risk and Insurance Conference; (4) the 6th Behavioural Finance Conference; and (5) the 4th International Conferences on Advances in Business & Law. In addition, he was recently awarded the 2016 Early Career Researcher Excellence in Research Award by the UQ Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, and the 2017 and 2024 Award for Excellence in Research by the UQ Business School.

Dr Tan teaches FINM3403 International Financial Management and FINM7402 Corporate Finance at UQ Business School, and was recently awarded the Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2013 and the Commendation for Postgraduate Teaching in 2017. Besides being an inspiring teaching instructor, Dr Tan is also a great research mentor for junior faculty and Ph.D. students. Dr Tan is particularly proud of all of his Ph.D. students, because all of them had at least one chapter of their theses published in an A* journal (ABDC ranked) and/or received at least a research award before their Ph.D. graduation. In addition, his current first-year PhD students have also been awarded a few numerous best paper awards at various prestigious international conferences. In recognition of his contribution to research supervision, he was awarded two research supervision awards in 2020: (1) the UQ Business School Award for Excellence in PhD Supervision; and (2) the Faculty of Business, Economics and Law (BEL) Award for Excellence in Higher Degree Research (HDR) Supervision.

His research has been featured in UQ News and more than 100 media outlets worldwide, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, 7News, ABC Radio, Harvard Business Review, Yahoo News, International Business Times, and MedicalXpress. By June 2022, it ranked in the top 0.2% of over 21 million research outputs tracked by Altmetric. In recognition of his cross-disciplinary contributions, he received the UQ Business School Cross-Disciplinary Research Award in 2022. Beyond academia, his work has informed policy discussions and has been cited by the World Bank, Bank of Korea, Bank of Finland, Office for National Statistics, Australian Centre for Financial Studies, and Africa CDC.

In terms of service and engagement within the UQ Business School (UQBS), Dr. Tan serves as the Honours Program Leader, also sitting on the UQBS Research Committee and UQBS Education Committee. Dr Tan was a Postgraduate Coordinator for the finance Ph.D. program between 2017 and 2020. Outside UQBS, Dr Tan serves as a Vice President (membership) and a board member for the Asian Finance Association, which is one of the top finance associations in Asia. Dr Tan is currently serving as a Deputy Editor at the Accounting and Finance Journal (ABDC "A" ranked Journal) and a Guest Editor for Pacific-Basin Finance Journal (A) and Accounting and Finance (A). Dr Tan also served as an Associate Editor at the Accounting Research Journal between 2018 and 2021.

His research interests focus on corporate finance, capital structure, and labor economics.