Professor | Marie-France and Rene Kern Chancellor’s Chair in Entrepreneurship | Distinguished Teaching Fellow
Entrepreneurship & Innovation | Finance

Studies how incentives shape innovation, entrepreneurship, and financial decisions.

About

Gustavo Manso is professor of finance, entrepreneurship, and innovation at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, where he holds the Marie-France and Rene Kern Chancellor’s Chair in Entrepreneurship. He studies how incentives affect innovation, entrepreneurship, and financial decisions.

Much of his research asks how incentives shape the choice between exploring new ideas and exploiting known ones. In “Motivating Innovation” (Journal of Finance, 2011) he shows that contracts which motivate innovation look different from standard pay-for-performance: because innovation means exploring untested approaches that often fail at first, the optimal scheme tolerates early failure and rewards long-term success. Later work tests this idea in a laboratory experiment (with Florian Ederer) and in the careers of academic scientists (with Pierre Azoulay and Joshua Graff Zivin), and traces its consequences for executive pay, research funding, corporate governance, ownership structure, and the business cycle. A related strand treats entrepreneurship as experimentation, and others study how information spreads in markets and how debt affects firms and households.

He joined UC Berkeley Haas in 2012 after five years on the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received a PhD in Finance from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, an MS in Mathematics from IMPA in Brazil, and a BA in Economics from PUC-Rio. He co-founded the Finance Theory Group in 2009, served as a department editor of Management Science from 2013 to 2021, and received the Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2012.

Expertise and Research Interests

  • Incentives for Innovation
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Experimentation
  • Corporate Finance
  • Information Economics
  • Executive Compensation