The Harbert College of Business welcomes four new tenure-track faculty this semester—Jason Pang-Li Chen, Christian Goulding, Ashley Roccapriore and Kristen Shockley. Their teaching and research focuses on topics in finance, management and entrepreneurship.

An assistant professor in the Department of Finance, Chen recently earned his doctorate from Drexel University. His research is in the field of empirical corporate finance, focusing on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

“I've always been curious about how the world works, and when I entered college, the financial crisis occurred,” Chen said. “I saw that many people were adversely affected by the collapse of this thing called the ‘financial system.’ This led me down the path of learning more about finance and eventually teaching finance.”

According to Chen, he aims to help students build a framework that allows them to think about the trade-offs between the costs and benefits of financial decisions, which will help prepare them for a great job and help them make better financial decisions.

Chen’s research in ESG issues includes the study of how to design policy to maximize social welfare. His work aims to shed light on this question by documenting the cost and benefits of regulation and corporate governance mechanisms.

In addition to his doctorate, Chen earned a master’s degree in economics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He also worked in the commercial banking sector in Shanghai.

Goulding is an assistant professor of finance. He conducts theoretical and empirical research across several investment disciplines. His research has been published in top-tier academic journals in finance, statistical inference and optimization.

He uses quantitative data and mathematics to solve problems, understand financial markets and make business decisions, while helping students learn these skills to secure good jobs and advance in their careers.

“I draw from both my business and academic experience to help students develop these valuable skills and to guide the next generation of finance professionals and researchers,” Goulding said.

He previously was a partner and senior vice president of signal research at Research Affiliates, LLC, and an assistant professor of finance at Michigan State University. Before his doctoral studies, he was a vice president at DFA Capital Management, Inc.

Recently, Goulding was the third-place recipient of the 2022 Roger F. Murray Prize from the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance (Q Group) for developing and testing a novel asset pricing theory applied to the U.S. stock market.

He earned his PhD in finance from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; his master's degrees in financial engineering and optimization from Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively; and his BA in applied mathematics, also from Cal-Berkeley.

An Auburn alumna, Roccapriore is an assistant professor in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship. She conducts research that focuses on how stakeholders–such as investors, customers, and employees—make decisions about entrepreneurs. She also explores how firm and investment failure, interpersonal relationships, and context influence the decisions of stakeholders and entrepreneurs.

Roccapriore uses qualitative and quantitative data to explore how individuals make decisions in the realm of entrepreneurship. In her teaching, she helps students gain the tools and resources they need to be successful entrepreneurs themselves.

She has published her work in top-tier management and entrepreneurship journals.  She has worked with numerous startups and small businesses on their business and marketing plans and has launched two small startups of her own.

She earned her PhD in strategy, entrepreneurship and organizations from the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee; her MBA and MS degrees in marketing from the University of Texas at Dallas; and her BS in entrepreneurship and family business from Auburn.

Before her doctoral studies, Roccapriore was a senior financial analyst and team leader at Ericsson North America.

Shockley is an associate professor of management. Her research focuses on organizational initiatives to help employees manage competing life demands, and she explores the relationship between work and family.

She is an associate editor for the Journal of Applied Psychology, which is widely regarded as one of the top journals in the field of organizational behavior. 

Under the broad umbrella of work-family issues, she is particularly interested in how organizational initiatives, such as flexible scheduling and remote work, help employees manage competing demands, how experiences of work-family conflict affect physiological health outcomes, and the gender dynamics within dual-earner couples who are attempting to juggle family and two careers.

Shockley sees these issues as pervasive.

“The majority of people end up working throughout most of their adult lives as well as having a family of some sort, which makes better understanding how to appropriately balance work and family to maximize happiness and success relevant to so many people,” Shockley said. “I see my overarching goal as a researcher to better understand how both men and women can have fulfilling work and family lives.

“There's this notion out there that it's very hard to ‘have it all,’ especially for women, but there are strategies that can make things more manageable, and I want to disseminate those ideas, as well as better understand the challenges associated with work-life management.” 

Before joining Harbert College, Shockley was an associate professor of psychology at the City University of New York and at the University of Georgia. She earned her PhD and her MS in industrial/organizational psychology from the University of South Florida, and her BS in psychology from Georgia.