Finance lecturer and PhD graduate Dr Kerry McCullough is looking forward to being able to focus on her key research interests now that her doctorate is complete.

McCullough’s doctoral research titled: Information Transmission on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), explores information transmission in the context of price discovery and risk transference between FTSE/JSE Top40 securities traded on the JSE. The study was supervised by Professor M Murray and Mr Barry Strydom.

‘The FTSE/JSE Top40 market for the index, futures and exchange-traded fund were considered using both daily and high-frequency trade data,’ said McCullough. ‘I found that the Top40 market was impacted by the behaviour of  international equities and gold returns, and that more stable economic periods in South Africa attracted capital inflow to our equity market.’

McCullough is keen to further explore capital markets and financial instruments and the factors that constitute information important to specific securities.

‘In education, I have done some research considering active learning techniques as well as encouraging meaningful research in group-based environments.  I would like to expand on my education-based research now that my finance-based PhD is done. Having said that, I also look forward to developing the final paper of my PhD where I used a latent variable modelling approach to determine which types of information are relatively more important than others to certain assets,’ said McCullough.

Although McCullough’s PhD is complete, she is grateful that she not only had the support of her husband, Craig, but also that of various writing and PhD cohorts where she could share her experiences with other candidates.

‘The absolute highlight of my PhD and UKZN experience has been the opportunity to participate in writing events and cohorts. I am beyond grateful to all the colleagues that took part in these which helped motivate me to keep going. My husband and I celebrate nine years of marriage the same week as graduation, and as there is no way that I could have done this PhD without his support, it is lovely to have both celebrations in the same week,’ she said.

Words: Thandiwe Jumo