Dr. Allan Dwyer, CFA is an Associate Professor of Finance at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada. Allan has worked in international finance for two decades. He spent most of his career as a financial analyst and investment banker in Tokyo, where he held senior roles with several global financial institutions including D.E. Shaw & Co., Salomon Smith Barney, and Citigroup. Allan speaks Japanese and closely follows Japanese politics, culture and history.

Allan transitioned to academia in 2005, when he returned to Canada to pursue a PhD in history at Memorial University. Completed in 2010-11, his multidisciplinary doctoral research focused on the impact of large economic and business systems on migrants and indigenous peoples in borderland areas.

At Mount Royal, Allan is consolidating his global finance and economics expertise with his doctoral research methodology to address contemporary sovereign debt markets. Allan is focusing on emerging and frontier market issuers located in the Global South and those with oil/gas industrial complexes. He is concentrating on the nexus where emerging market debt, political risk and human security meet. Allan’s background equips him well to pursue questions such as how the ongoing global financial crisis has exposed the weaknesses in traditional methods of sovereign credit analysis and political risk forecasting. A central research question pertains to the effect of external market mechanisms on the credit ratings, and thus access to global credit markets, of emerging market issuers. This ultimately has an impact on levels of human security in those countries. Another avenue of enquiry is the effect of elections on the performance of sovereign bonds in frontier economies. Dr. Dwyer’s current research universe is the countries in the JP Morgan Next Generation Markets (NEXGEM) Index, including Nigeria and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.