Kevin Murphy

Kenneth L. Trefftzs Chair in Finance, Professor of Finance and Business Economics - USC

Kevin J. Murphy is the Kenneth L. Trefftzs Chair in Finance in the Department of Finance and Business Economics (FBE) at the USC Marshall School, where he currently serves as department chair. In addition, he also holds an appointment as Professor of Business and Law in the USC Gould Law School. He previously served as chair for the FBE Department from 2003-2004, and as the Marshall School’s Vice Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs from 2004-2007. He is an internationally known expert on executive compensation, and is the author of more than fifty articles, cases, books, or book chapters relating to compensation and incentives in organizations. Results from his research on executive compensation have appeared in the popular, business and professional press. Prior to joining USC in 1995, Professor Murphy spent five years on the faculty of the Harvard Business School and seven years on the faculty of the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Management. He spent the 1994-1995 academic year on leave from Harvard as Visiting Scholar and Consultant at Towers Perrin, where his activities included making formal presentations and leading informal roundtable discussions on executive compensation to clients nationwide, as well as being involved in a variety of consulting engagements. In 2009 he served as advisor to the U. S. Treasury’s Special Master of Executive Compensation. He has served as an expert witness in a variety of high-profile compensation cases, including those involving Drexel Burnham (Michael Milken), Disney (Michael Ovitz) and the NYSE (Richard Grasso). He has offered testimony relating to executive compensation to the U.S. House of Representatives and Congressional Oversight Panel and has given speeches and presentations on compensation and incentives to a variety of academic and practitioner audiences, including the Conference Board, WorldatWork, and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. Professor Murphy received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of Chicago, and his B.A. from UCLA.