Postdoctoral Scholar

The Fellow will be part of Berkeley’s “Initiative in Behavioral Economics and Finance”, housed jointly in the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics. The Initiative’s mission is to generate a portfolio of rigorous academic research in various areas of Behavioral economics, including labor economics, financial economics, macro-finance, political economy, public economics, and health economics. Ulrike Malmendier and Stefano Della Vigna, both joint faculty members at the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics, co-direct the Initiative. Faculty from the departments of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Economics, the Haas Business School, the School of Public Health, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the Information School are affiliated with the initiative.

Areas of research interest include, but are not limited to,

• models and empirical evidence of belief formation in macro-finance, especially work on experience effects and memory formation;
• household decision-making: household finance, health choices, consumption
• firm decision-making: corporate finance and in particular managerial biases, including overconfidence, sunk-cost fallacy, and hindsight bias;
• neuroscience foundations of modern models of belief formation and economic/financial decision-making.

Applicants are expected to (1) pitch their existing research (either for a coming job market, or work used on the job market in the past season), (2) propose possible areas of collaboration, including concrete project ideas, and (3) demonstrate their ability to productively contribute to possible projects of collaboration proposed by us.

Basic qualifications (required at time of application)
Ph.D. (or equivalent international degree) required by start date.

Preferred qualifications
Ph.D. (or equivalent international degree) by start date in economics, finance, and related fields who are interested in studying themes related to behavioral economics behavioral finance, and applied economics are invited to apply.

Scholars with strengths in applied microeconometrics, field experiments, and applied data science (including machine learning and computational methods for working with unstructured data) are particularly encouraged.