Ellen Oglesby Carr
Ellen Carr is a principal and high yield bond portfolio manager at Barksdale Investment
Management (BIM), a majority women-owned investment management firm focused on
investment grade and high yield fixed income. Prior to joining BIM in 2013, Ellen spent 11 years
at The Capital Group as a leveraged credit analyst and portfolio manager.
Ellen is also an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Business School, where she teaches
courses on the credit cycle, investment grade and high yield bonds, and cash flow forecasting.
She is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, the co-author of a book on women in
investment management, Undiversified: The Big Gender Short in Investment Management
(published in 2021 by Columbia University Press), and the editor of The Credit Investor’s
Handbook (to be published in January 2024 by Wiley).
Ellen is a trustee of the National Public Radio Foundation, as well as a board member of the
Community Foundation of Western North Carolina and the UNCA Foundation. She chairs the
investment committee for both of these organizations. Ellen also manages a family foundation
(carrfamilyfoundation.org) which awards college scholarships in rural communities.
Ellen has an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University
and a B.A. from Harvard, where she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
Ellen splits her time among Asheville, rural Tennessee, and New York. She has one son, one cat,
and two dogs.
Corporate Credit Markets (FINC-968-5)
Fixed income is not just one asset class, but rather a broad array of markets ranging from "risk-free" bonds (US Treasuries), with a guaranty of repayment by the US government, to highly speculative instruments (distressed debt) with a meaningful risk of default. Corporate credit, the focus of this course, is a third fixed income category which sits between Treasuries and stocks on the risk spectrum, and includes investment grade bonds, high yield bonds/loans, and private credit instruments.
