Douglas Cumming

Douglas J. Cumming (born 1970) is a Canadian financial economist. He is the DeSantis Distinguished Professor and chair of the finance department in the College of Business at Florida Atlantic University in the United States.

Early life and education
Cumming was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1970. His father, Gordon Rosevear Cumming, was a cardiologist and a member of the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics and finance from McGill University in Montreal, a master's degree in economics from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and a JD and a PhD in economics and finance from the University of Toronto.

Career
Cumming was associate professor of finance in the School of Banking and Finance at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia until 2005, when he was appointed director of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He and his wife, Sofia Johan, were both subsequently employed by the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, where Cumming was a full professor. In 2018, they moved to the College of Business at Florida Atlantic University, where Cumming was appointed the DeSantis Distinguished Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship. In 2022, he became chair of the department.

Cumming has published extensively on venture capital, including a 2007 paper arguing that tax-subsidized government venture capital funds crowded out non-subsidized funds in Canada. The tax credit was removed in Ontario in 2011 and federally in 2017. Cumming is on the advisory committee for the National Crowdfunding and Fintech Association of Canada.

Other published research by Cumming includes findings that more people are likely to start businesses in countries with liberal bankruptcy laws and that a greater percentage of women on boards of directors is associated with less frequent and less severe fraud.

Awards and honors
In 2021, Cumming and his collaborators received the 2021 Helena Yli-Renko Research Impact Award, sponsored by the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the USC Marshall School of Business.

In 2022, Cumming was listed by Clarivate as one of 92 most-cited scholars in the world in the area of business and economics.