Dr. Christopher B. Yenkey is an Associate Professor in the Sonoco International Business Department at the Darla Moore School of International Business.
Professor Yenkey’s research extends sociological theories of social diversity, segregation, and inter-group trust into the analysis of market development, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. This line of work is exemplified by his work on multiple aspects of investor participation in Kenya’s frontier stock market, the Nairobi Securities Exchange. Here, he analyzes how ethnic group boundaries influence the transmission of market information through a diverse society and how coethnic relationships between investors and intermediaries paradoxically increase vulnerability to fraud victimization without reducing trust in the market. Professor Yenkey studies the consequences of corruption in two other projects, one on global capital flows to African countries through the SWIFT interbank transfer network and another on organizational responses to performance enhancing drug use in professional sports.
Professor Yenkey’s research has been recognized with several awards, including the William H. Newman Best Dissertation Paper Award from the Academy of Management, the Louis R. Pondy Best Paper Award from the Organization and Management Theory Division of the AOM, and the Ronald S. Burt Outstanding Paper Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Economic Sociology.
While earning his PhD in Sociology at Cornell University, Yenkey served as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Economic Affairs in Nairobi, Kenya. More recently, he was Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University from 2010-11. Prior to his graduate studies, Yenkey received a BA in Economics from the University of Texas-Austin in 2001 and served as a Research Associate in the Department of Economic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City from 2001-03.