Keith Vorkink was appointed advancement vice president May 18, 2020. In addition to general university administrative duties, Vorkink oversees Athletics, BYU Broadcasting, University Communications, Alumni & External Relations, and Philanthropies.
Prior to serving as the advancement vice president, Vorkink served as an associate dean in the Marriott School of Business, where he held the Douglas and Effie Driggs Professorship in Finance. He has also been a visiting professor for the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focused on behavioral economics and on asset pricing. More specifically, Vorkink studies how variance or skewness in a security’s payoff distribution and the preferences of investors affect asset pricing.
Vorkink received an undergraduate degree in economics at BYU in 1994. He then went to the University of Rochester, where he earned an MA and then a PhD in economics in 2000. After working for a year as an assistant professor at Bryant College, he returned to his alma mater, teaching in the BYU Marriott School of Management, first as an assistant professor, then an associate professor and, since 2011, as a full professor.
Vorkink has received multiple research awards in the BYU Department of Finance, was honored with the top research award in the Marriott School of Business in 2005. He was awarded BYU’s Young Scholar Award in 2007 and a teaching excellence award from the Marriott School in 2012. His work has appeared in several top finance publications. He is a member of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association and the Econometric Society. A lesser-known fact about Keith: he played basketball for Snow College.