Ulrike Malmendier
Faculty Director & Co-Founder
Cora Jane Flood Professor of Finance, Berkeley HaasProfessor of Economics, Berkeley Economics
Ulrike Malmendier is the recipient of the prestigious Fischer Black Prize from the American Finance Association, given biennially to the top financial scholar under the age of 40. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2017. She is also a Distinguished Teaching Award recipient, the highest teaching honor conferred on the Berkeley campus.
Research Summary
Ulrike Malmendier’s work is focussed at the intersection of economics and finance, and examines how individuals make mistakes and systematically biased decisions. Much of her research has focused on biases of CEOs and other high-level managers and leaders. Her recent work in behavioral economics focuses on how lifetime experiences of economic shocks, such as high inflation and unemployment, shape an individual’s later economic behavior.
Stefano DellaVigna
Co-Founder
Daniel E. Koshland, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics
Professor of Business Administration, Berkeley Haas
Stefano DellaVigna is a co-editor of the flagship journal in economics, the American Economic Review, and has also been a co-editor of the first Handbook of Behavioral Economics. He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow for 2008-10 and is a Distinguished Teaching Award recipient, the highest teaching honor conferred on the Berkeley campus.
Research Summary
Stefano DellaVigna’s recent research examines the impact of behavioral factors in a variety of economic settings, including persuasion in voting, the forecast of experimental results, and the impact of present-bias and reference dependence on unemployment. His research on behavioral finance has focused on limited attention among investors.
Ned Augenblick
Associate Professor, Economic Analysis and Policy Group, Berkeley Haas
Ned Augenblick is a professor in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group at Berkeley Haas. Augenblick studied economics and psychology at Georgetown and mathematics at the University College Dublin, and received his PhD in Economics from Stanford.
Research Summary
Ned Augenblick’s research focuses on the intersection of economics and psychology, and examines how beliefs, preferences and framing modulate behaviors in a variety of fields including politics and religion. Using a combination of techniques, he explores topics such as the influence of “choice fatigue” on decision making; the role of privacy preferences of agents in matchmaking scenarios and theoretical and empirical models to measure Bayesian updating.
Anastassia-Fedyk
Assistant Professor of finance, Berkeley Haas
Anastassia Fedyk is an Assistant Professor of finance at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Anastassia holds a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University and a BA in Mathematics with honors from Princeton University. Prior to pursuing her academic career, Anastassia Fedyk was a researcher and portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
Research Summary
Anastassia Fedyk’s research focuses on behavioral biases in individual and group decision-making, particularly concerning information and belief formation. She studies how information from a variety of sources, including financial news and individual employment records, influences asset prices.
Ming Hsu
William Halford Jr. Family Chair in Marketing
Associate Professor of Business Administration, Berkeley Haas
Prior to joining Berkeley, he was assistant professor of economics and neuroscience at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Research Summary
Ming Hsu’s research involves using neuroscientific and computational tools to understand the biological basis of economic and consumer decision-making. His work is focussed on understanding how brain-based methods can be used to generate and validate insights into customers’ thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
Shachar Kariv
Benjamin N. Ward Professor of Economics
Shachar Kariv is a recent Chair of the Economics Department and former Faculty Director of Experimental Social Science Laboratory (XLab).
Research Summary
Shachar Kariv’s research focuses on understanding how social preferences influence economic decision making. His recent work in behavioral economics uses experimental approaches to explore topics such as the distributional preferences of Americans during periods of heightened economic and social upheaval, the effect of gasoline prices on consumer spending and the differences in economic rationality of elites in developed and developing countries.
Supreet Kaur
Associate Professor, Berkeley Economics
Supreet Kaur founded and currently leads a campus-wide initiative on the Psychology and Economics of Poverty, based at the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA). She was awarded the CESifo Distinguished Affiliate Award in Behavioural Economics in 2015 and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2018.
Research Summary
Supreet Kaur is a development economist, with research interests in behavioral and labor economics. Her research explores how social norms and behavioral biases such as the limits of human cognition and self-control problems can affect individual behavior and market equilibria. Her research uses insights from behavioral economics to explain why wages, unemployment, and organizational structures look the way they do.
Peter Maxted
Assistant Professor of Finance, Berkeley Haas
Peter Maxted is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Berkeley Haas. He is a recipient of the 2021 AQR Top Finance Graduate Award recognizing the most promising finance PhD graduates.
Research Summary
Peter Maxted‘s research spans finance, behavioral economics, and macroeconomics. In recent work, he has studied how over-optimistic beliefs can lead to a buildup of crash risk in financial markets, and how present bias affects households’ response to fiscal and monetary policy.
Don Moore
Professor, Management of Organizations Group, Berkeley Haas
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair in Leadership and Communication
Don is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and holds the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair in Leadership and Communication at the Haas School of Business. Prior to Haas, Don served on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business, where he held the Carnegie Bosch chair.
Research Summary
Don Moore’s work examines overconfidence in decision-making, negotiation, and ethical choice. His recent work in behavioral economics examines overconfidence in economic forecasts.
Terry Odean
The Rudd Family Foundation Chair, Finance Group, Berkeley Haas
Terrance Odean is a member of the Russell Sage Behavioral Economics Roundtable, is a Wall Street Journal Expert Panelist, and has been an editor of the Review of Financial Studies, one of the top-three finance journals.
Research Summary
Terrance Odean examines how psychologically motivated decisions affect investor welfare and securities prices. His research explores how behavioral factors such as risk aversion and overconfidence influence decision making by retail investors. His recent work in behavioral economics includes an empirical study of the effect of overconfidence on the performance of investors with low security-selection ability and understanding the risk taking behaviors of participants in economic experiments
Ricardo Perez-Truglia
Associate Professor, Economic Analysis and Policy Group, Berkeley Haas
Perez-Truglia has been published in premier academic journals such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy. His research has been featured in media outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist and National Public Radio. In 2020, Perez-Truglia was named a Sloan Research Fellow.
Research Summary
Ricardo Perez-Truglia’s research lies at the intersection of behavioral economics, political economy and public economics. His research is focussed on the role of social image and social comparisons in influencing economic behavior and how price expectations, tax compliance and preferences for redistribution are shaped by how firms and individuals acquire and process information.
Dmitry Taubinsky
Associate Professor, Berkeley Economics
Dmitry Taubinsky is an associate professor (with tenure) of economics at UC Berkeley, and a research associate at the NBER.
Research Summary
Dmitry Taubinsky conducts research at the intersection of behavioral and public economics. Using a combination of techniques, he studies topics such as inattention to and misunderstanding of complex tax incentives; “sin taxes” on goods such as sugary drinks; energy policy for inattentive or misinformed consumers; welfare effects of non-standard policy levers (e.g., social recognition); and financial decision-making by low income populations (e.g., payday loan borrowers).