Harold Mulherin III — RIP
by
Michael T. Maloney
Professor Emeritus
John E. Walker Department of Economics
January 3, 2021
Harold used to love to say, “I’m working for Mike Maloney.” It was a
play on the movie, Blazing Saddles, where Slim Pickens confronts Dom Deluise
with a similar line. Appropriate because Harold and I probably watched Blazing
Saddles together a thousand times usually waking up mid-way through the second
loop of the VHS, and I did hire Harold. Back in 1985. I hired him over the
phone based on nothing but a second-hand recommendation from Ben Klein through
Matt Lindsay and the knowledge he was from Savannah. Sometimes shooting from
the hip pays off.
Harold and I were rowdy friends straight off. Probably too rowdy. I could tell a million stories about our revelry, fun and reckless, but just one will do. My first trip to France enjoyed his company. My wife and I met him in Paris in route to Brussels for a conference. My wife planned several stops at cathedrals along the way, to which I gave a grave and doubtful look. Harold said, “Don’t worry. Next to every cathedral is a pub.” He was right. We were told by Marty that we missed the thumb (or was it nose?) of John the Baptist, but the beer was good. True to our Scotch-Irish stock, we always drank standing because in France it is cheaper that way.
I’ll leave the other tales for another time, but more interesting are the subtle stories, like the pre-historic sea-monster found in the Savannah city pond, which was, in fact, a tarpon placed there by his own self and companions. The story was told to me in snippets over a period of 10 years. It was like Old Man and the Sea. It involved his father, and tarpon fishing, and a reel with a bird’s nest of tangled line, and a fish that stayed dormant on the bottom until the line was untangled, and drinking too much, and not ever drinking again, and the meaning of life. It unfolded in disjoint segments like a Quintin Tarantino movie. I finally pieced it all together, and it was who Harold was to me. No doubt, others have had their own revealing moments because Harold was a complicated character.
However, his scholarship was uncomplicated. Collect a pile of data and see what it says. And he did time and again. He came to Clemson with a dissertation job-market paper that was a killer. He had read 10,000+ natural gas contracts and had laid out a theory consistent with the evidence that explained why, for instance, sometimes the well owner paid for the feeder line and sometimes the pipeline company did so. I had already hired him but needed to push him through the hoops so he gave his paper. It is still in my lecture notes. His presentation style was a bit too flippant for some, but that’s a chairman’s job: throw oil on the seas of discontent.
Harold and Mason Gerety started a project of dubious promise. They were hand collecting NYSE volume data from the beginning. Why wasn’t clear. Matt and I were content to let them run with it; Bobby, less so. Nonetheless, they collected data, day and night, for a year. They clocked more hours than Mark Mitchell who was always last to leave Sirrine at night and often beat me in the next morning. In the end, Harold and Mason were able to say something profound in my opinion. Trading patterns reflect the Fisherian principle: assets trade to allocate risk to those most capable of bearing it.[1]
In the late ‘80s, one of my Master’s students got the
idea of looking at the stock market reaction to the Challenger Disaster. This
was the blossoming of event studies. The first attempt was somewhat crude—just
daily returns that pointed to the culprit—but it piqued Harold’s interest. He
thought that intra-day trading would show something more profound. I was not
sure he was right but he did talk me into a ten year struggle with the data
from which Harold painted a picture of his Coasian belief in the magic of
markets. Independent, autonomous actors using the stock market to express their
insight pinpointed the cause and effect of the explosion of the space craft in
essentially a matter of minutes.[2]
Harold retired several months ago. Jeff Netter asked me to try to talk him out of it. I talked, but I think my efforts actually pushed in the opposite direction. I asked Harold to join us on our last fishing trip in October. He declined probably because of declining health, which was unknown to me. I bought several new fishing rigs (Harold would not allow them to be called fishing “poles”) in anticipation of an upcoming, full-blown season with him—alas, not to be. Maybe Taylor, Skip, and I will go make the run into McQueens one more time in his memory.
[1]
“Trading Halts and Market Activity: An Analysis of
Volume at the Open and the Close” at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1992.tb04682.x”
[2] “The complexity of price discovery in an efficient market: the stock market reaction to the Challenger crash” at http://maloney.people.clemson.edu/challenger.pdf
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