Associate Professor | Soloman P. Lee Chair in Business Ethics
Finance | Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership | Sustainability

About

Adair Morse is a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley. Beginning in February 2021, she is on leave from UC Berkeley to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Capital Access in the Office of Domestic Finance at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Morse holds the Soloman P. Lee Chair in Business Ethics and is Associate Professor of Finance at the Haas School of Business. She is also a fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Business, and Founding Faculty Director of the Sustainable and Impact Finance Initiative. She sits on the Governance and Allocation Committee of the California Rebuilding Fund, a public-private partnership of the State of California to provide affordable small business loans. She is also an Expert Panel Member of the Norwegian Ministry of Finance, for oversight of the $1 trillion sovereign fund.

Morse’s research spans multiple areas of finance: household finance, sustainable investing, discrimination and corruption, venture capital, and pension management, with the unifying theme that she tries to choose topics useful for leveling economic playing fields. Recent work includes papers on algorithmic discrimination, small business policy during the pandemic, impact and sustainable investment, pension governance, and communication from the Federal Reserve. Her publications appear in the top economics and finance journals, and she has won a number of top finance research prizes, including the Brattle Prize, the Jensen Prize, prizes at the EFA and WFA, the Moskowitz Impact prize, among others. Many of her various works have been directly implemented into policy, including actions by the U.S. Congress, the Greek Parliament, and many state banking regulators. She holds a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Michigan.

Expertise and Research Interests

  • Household Finance
  • Sustainable and Impact Investing
  • Entrepreneurship and Small Business
  • Pension Asset Management