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BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Nicholas Wilson
Professor Nicholas Wilson has held the Chair in Credit Risk and Finance at Leeds
University Business School since 1998 and is Director of the Credit Management Research
Centre (CMRC). He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Credit Management (FICM).
Professor Wilson gained a BA honours degree in Industrial Economics from the University of
Nottingham and completed a Phd at the same institution. He was appointed as a Research
Fellow at the WissenschaftsZentrum Berlin (WZB Industrial Policy Unit) in 1980. Professor
Wilson was appointed to a lectureship in Applied Economics at the University of Bradford in
1984 and was appointed to the first Chair in Credit Management in July 1993, establishing the
Credit Management Research Group. In 1998 the ICM Chair and the Credit Management
Research Centre moved to the University of Leeds with significant commercial sponsorship.
CMRC enjoyed continual commercial sponsorship for 15 years. He has been Director of
Research for the Accounting and Finance Division of the School and a member of the
Schools Research Committee. He has received a number of large research grants from the
ESRC, Government departments, commercial sponsors and other funding bodies. Most
recently he has attracted funding in relation to new ‘Big data’ funding initiatives specializing
in business data analytics and developed and launched new post graduate and undergraduate
courses on credit and financial analytics. He has recently led the development of the Leeds
Institute of Data Analytics, a cross faculty initiative on ‘Big data’. He is co-investigator on
the Consumer Data Research Centre (ESRC, £5m grant). He was recipient of a Leeds
University Research Impact Award in 2016.
Professor Wilson’s work combines academic rigour with practical and policy
relevance. His work as well as being published in leading academic journals has had
considerable impact at the level of government policy and business practices. His work on
entrepreneurial and growth finance (Venture Capital and Private Equity) and the nature and
scale of ‘equity gaps’ has influenced government policy on tax advantaged venture capital
schemes (Summer Budget 2015). Earlier work, with particular policy relevance, focussed on
small firm financing; debt management in the corporate and government sector; corporate
governance, board diversity and corporate performance; corporate and personal insolvency;
credit scoring and credit risk modelling. His work on the build up of corporate and household
debt and warnings around the consequent fragility of the UK economy was widely reported in
the media prior to the financial crisis of 2008.
Professor Wilson sat on the Better Payment Practice Group (1997-2007). He provided
analysis to BIS and Ministers on the impact of legislation (The Late payment of Commercial
Debts Interest Act, 1998) and other interventions aimed at improving trade credit payment
behaviour towards small firms. BIS commissioned him, to write a policy report: An
Investigation into Payment Trends and Behaviour 1997-2007, published in 2008. Professor
Wilson has acted as a consultant on issues of credit and debt management, credit scoring and
modelling and policy for major organisations in the financial services, corporate sector and
government. He has acted as a consultant for the National Audit Office, Office of Fair
Trading, Department of Trade and Industry, The Stationery Office (Insolvency Forecasting)
and UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR) amongst others. He has competed a series of
commissioned reports on debt management and collection in the government sector (e.g.
HMRC, The Redundancy Payment Service and the Criminal Justice System). The work on
the HMRC collections and recovery systems was reported in a series of NAO reports and
recommendations. He has completed other consultancy projects on diverse subjects such as;
advertising and competition policy (OFT); labour demand and training in the Museums sector;
advertising on BBC radio (Peacock Inquiry). He produced a report for Business Environment
and Regulatory Reform (now BIS) on an evaluation of late payment legislation in the UK. He
was appointed to a Government ‘Expert Working Group’ on consumer credit information in
2008. A series of reports for the Welsh Assembly was produced in 2010-2013 on SME
performance in Wales and on growth firms in Wales and the regions. He was a panel member
for the Independent Commission on Banking’s public forum in Leeds, November 2010. He
was on the Expert Economists sub-panel of the Breedon Task Force 2012 which was
commissioned to “examine structural and behavioural barriers to the development of
alternative debt markets in the UK” in advance of the 2012 Budget. His work on board
composition and female directorships was cited in the recent Davies Report, ‘Women on
Boards” (BIS, 2011) and reported in the international press. Joint work with Imperial College
(Professor Mike Wright) on Private Equity and Venture Capital Investments has been
published in leading academic journals and has been widely reported in the international
business press (e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Dow Jones, Thomson
Reuters, Economist). His collaborative work with the financial services industry was
recognised in 2007 by a national award for work on ‘Knowledge Transfer’ from the
Economic and Social Research Council. He was awarded a University of Leeds certificate of
Outstanding Achievement for “Academic Excellence in Enterprise and Knowledge Transfer”
in 2006. He was listed in Credit Today Magazine as one of the top 100 most influential
people in the Credit Industry in 2008.
Professor Wilson has published widely in academic journals, government policy
documents and the business press. He has published over 70 papers in leading academic
journals in economics, finance, labour relations, marketing and business forecasting including:
Economic Journal, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Corporate Finance, Small
Business Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, British Journal of Industrial
Relations, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, Journal of Market Research,
International Business Review, Journal of Credit Risk, Business History, International Small
Business Journal, Journal of Operations Research Society Managerial and Decision
Economics. He has over 3500 citations as listed in Google Scholar and an H-Index of 30. His
work is regularly referred to in government publications, the House of Commons (Hansard)
and the International Press, TV and Radio. Professor Wilson has presented keynote speeches,
papers and seminars at Credit Conferences across Europe, the US, South America, Australia
and the Far East.
Professor Wilson has been active in raising research funds from the research councils
and commercial sponsors. He has been awarded a number of ESRC grants and Knowledge
Transfer Partnership awards. Recent awards include: ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre
(c £5m coinvestigator); The Welsh Assembly (2010-13); Rake Fund, ISBE (2011); British
Venture capital Associations (2011). The Credit Management Research Centre (CMRC)
received over £900,000 in commercial sponsorship 1993-2008. CMRC has produced many
industry reports including: the Credit Management Quarterly Review, The Atradius Export
Survey, the Euler Hermes Survey of European Businesses, the CSA survey of Debt
Management and Collection and a regular survey of SME’s in the UK. The Credit
Management Research Centre have developed and maintained ‘www. PaymentScorer.com’ to
monitor the payment behaviour of UK Plc’s until 2009.
In September 2001 Professor Wilson set up CreditScorer Ltd, a Leeds University
spin-out company. CreditScorer Ltd was established with funding from the White Rose
Innovation Fund (£250,000) and houses a credit reference database for the population of UK
businesses. The company received a second round investment of £1,000,000 from the
Bonnier Group in July 2003 and was acquired by Bisnode in 2007. The company has
developed an on-line benchmarking and risk management service for businesses
(CreditScorer.com; RiskScorer.com), the Utilities sector (UtilityScorer.com) and a debt
pricing service for the debt sale and purchase market (Debtpricer.com). Professor Wilson has
developed alogorithms that generate real time risk scores and default probabilities (PDs) for
the population of UK Companies and Small Businesses and on-line portfolio management
facilities. CreditScorer built commercial risk scores for the credit agency ICC Ltd (part of the
Bisnode Group) and Basel II compliant risk management systems for major banks.
Professor Wilson’s early career was as an applied economist. His work at the WZB
involved modelling multivariate times series and macroeconomic forecasting, modelling the
impact of advertising at macro and micro levels, modelling labour demand and investigating
the impact of internal organisation, participation and profit-sharing on the productivity
performance of British and German companies. He was appointed senior Research Fellow at
the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick in 1983 to work on an ESRC
funded study of productivity performance in British and German Manufacturing with
Professor John Cable. This work led to publications in international journals including the
Economic Journal and Industrial and Labor Relations Review and collaboration with the
London School of Economics, Centre for Economic Performance. Since taking up the Chair
Management and Finance his academic work has focussed on corporate finance and corporate
risk including studies of Private Equity and leveraged buyouts, bankruptcy prediction, board
dynamics and gender, family business, trade credit, financial and working capital
management, credit management practice, credit scoring and modelling, and new statistical
and econometric methodologies for credit risk modelling. His work combines academic
rigour with practitioner and policy relevance.
Professor Wilson has held visiting academic, lecturing and research positions at the
University of Economics, Bratislava; Centre for Economic Performance, London School of
Economics, The European University in Florence, The Dauer Institute, Sao Paulo, Brazil, The
University of Mauritius and the China-EC Management Institute, Beijing, China. In 1989 he
taught Decision Sciences in Beijing MBA programme. He is Visiting Professor at the
National University of Economics, Bratislava. He has acted as external examiner for the
University of Nottingham, University of Wales (Overseas Programmes in Cyprus and Spain),
University of Huddersfield, University of Lancaster, Dublin Institute of Technology, the
University of Mauritius and The University of Loughborough. He has examined over 20 Phd
theses at UK and Overseas Universities. His teaching at Leeds covers: Credit Scoring; Credit
Risk and Credit Management (Masters, Phd); Financial Econometrics (Masters, Phd);
Research Methods (Phd) and Current Issues in Finance (Undergraduate). He has acted on
Editorial Boards of a number of leading journals and edited Special Issues.
Current Research
His current research includes: private equity portfolio company performance; venture capital,
the equity gap, growth companies; family business; Corporate governance and board diversity;
UK audit market and audit pricing and switching, trade credit: theory and empirical analysis;
credit risk modelling, sovereign ratings, credit management practice; corporate distress and
failure prediction modelling.
Current Teaching
LUBS 2225 Credit and Financial Analytics (double module)
LUBS 5025 Financial Analysis and Modelling
LUBS 5036 Consumer and Corporate Credit