Robert A. Connolly
Executive Vice President

Robert A. Connolly is visiting professor of finance in the Miami Herbert School of Business where he teaches Real Estate Development for undergraduate and MBA students. His current research interests include loan supply effects on real estate pricing, real estate as collateral, equity capital cost estimation, leasing, and inflation non-neutrality. His research has been published in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, the Journal of Financial Markets, and Real Estate Economics, among other outlets. He has presented his work at AREUEA, RERI, AFA, WFA, FMA, Econometric Society, and is serving as the Executive Vice-President of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association. He has won more than 15 awards for teaching, research and service in the last 30 years.

Before retiring from UNC-Chapel Hill, he a wide variety of finance and applied economics courses to undergraduate and graduate students. He also taught financial management and cost control methods for Navy SES, flag officers and Marine general officers; Army SES and general officers, for senior officers and enlisted leaders in the U.S. Air Force; and for the Senior Executive Service of the Department of Veterans Affairs. He served an advisor to the U.S. Navy on shipbuilding and aviation acquisition programs for seven years. He received the Navy’s second highest civilian honor, the Superior Public Service Award, for his work with the U.S. Navy.

He also led an outreach effort to support soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines serving in dangerous, remote locations in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2005 to 2013, shipping over 14 tons of care packages. For this work, he has been recognized with honorary membership in three U.S. Army regiments.

He was an early pioneer in developing TV-online courses for undergraduate and MBA students. His microeconomics and macroeconomics courses were distributed nationwide by PBS in the early 2000’s, and each won three national awards for excellence in higher education distance learning.

He was founding director of the Capital Markets Lab at UNC Kenan-Flagler in 2008 with responsibility for transforming the finance curriculum to incorporate sophisticated financial information and computational technology.

He received his PhD, MA and BA from the University of Maryland.