Synthesizing academic and practitioner research.

"How can we increase the value of research to financial executives?" This is a question that Prof. M. Mark Walker thinks about a lot.

Walker is an associate professor of Finance at the University of Mississippi, and he's been an FEI member since 2000. He joined the Memphis Chapter in 2001, joined the chapter's board of the chapter in 2002, became chapter president in 2005, joined the FERF Research Committee in 2005 and became a FERF Trustee in 2009.

But Walker was not always an academic. After graduating from North Carolina State University with a degree in civil engineering, he accepted a job in the Washington, D.C., area. He was soon taking night business classes at George Washington University, and decided to get an MBA from Penn State University. After another stint in the corporate world, Walker earned his Ph.D. in Business Administration with a concentration in Finance from Michigan State University. "I was just trying to find out what I was really interested in."

Walker is now a full-time professor, having taught candidates at three levels--undergraduate, master's level and doctorate. He explains that each level of student has a different objective. "Undergraduates need to understand the basic concepts, tools and theories of finance. Master's level students need to know how to apply the various theories and tools in a specific situation to solve a problem. And Ph.D. candidates need to learn how to develop and test new theories."

To illustrate these differences, Walker offers an example: The undergraduate student, he says, asks, "What is the definition of a firm's optimal capital structure and why is the concept important to financial managers?" The MBA student asks, "How does a financial manager determine the firm's optimal capital structure in a given situation?" And the Ph.D. students asks, "Is there an optimal capital structure, and, if so, what are the key determinants?"

He further extrapolates these differences to the corporate world. "An executive wants to find a solution to a particular problem now, but an academic will try to understand an issue by examining it from a number of different perspectives."

So executives and academics often benefit from different types of research. Executives often benefit more by reading case studies and interview-based research, especially about companies in their own industry, and academics often focus on empirical research whose sample firms span a variety of industries and situations. Walker...