Professor of Finance | Mitsubishi Bank Chair in International Business and Finance | Distinguished Teaching Fellow
Finance
About
Johan Walden is a financial economist and expert on risk analysis and financial and insurance markets, with a particular focus on portfolio risk diversification and risk regulation. He is a tenured Professor of Finance at Berkeley Haas, where he also serves as Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow and Distinguished Teaching Fellow. He regularly teaches MBA, MFE, and executive education courses covering topics in finance, asset pricing, and financial engineering. He has also served as a visiting scholar at other top universities, including NYU’s Stern School of Business, UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, Oxford University, and INSEAD.
Walden has published over 30 academic articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics of risk, diversification, asset pricing, and applied mathematics. His research has been published in the top academic journals in his fields, including the Journal of Finance, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Risk and Insurance, Journal of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Banking and Finance. His research on heavy-tailed risks and portfolio diversification in economics, finance, and insurance was published as part of the Springer book series Lecture Notes in Statistics.
Over the course of his academic career, Walden has received over 20 honors, awards, grants, and fellowships. He has presented his research at some of the world’s preeminent universities and finance conferences, including the American Finance Association and European Finance Association, among others. He also serves as a referee for many of the top academic journals in economics, finance, and insurance, including Econometrica, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Risk and Insurance.
His consulting experience includes complex corporate litigation, where he has authored expert reports and provided expert witness testimony on issues related to investment theory, risk, diversification, risk reporting and insurance. Before entering academia, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company’s Stockholm office, where he focused on corporate strategy, particularly within the telecommunications and financial institutions industries. Walden’s consulting experience also includes assisting government entities in assessing new programs and regulations. In 2009, he assisted The Congressional Oversight Panel in evaluating the Federal Reserve Board’s Supervisory Capital Assessment Program.
Expertise and Research Interests
- Asset Pricing
- Heavy-tailed Risks
- Networks and Capital Markets
- Insurance
- Johan Walden. Trading, Profits, and Volatility in a Dynamic Information Network Model. Review of Economic Studies.
2018 - Richard Stanton, Johan Walden, Nancy Wallace. Mortgage Loan Flow Networks and Financial Norms. Review of Financial Studies.
2018 - Johan Walden, Rustam Ibragimov, Dwight Jaffee. Equilibrium with Monoline and Multiline Structures. Review of Finance.
2018 - Johan Walden. Recovery with Unbounded Diffusion Processes. Review of Finance.
2017 - Johan Walden. Comment on: “The intended and unintended consequences of financial-market regulations: A general equilibrium analysis” by Adrian Buss, Bernard Dumas, Raman Uppal, and Grigory Vilkov. Journal of Monetary Economics.
2016 - Johan Walden, Marcus Opp, Christine Parlour. Markup cycles, dynamic misallocation and amplification. Journal of Economic Theory.
2014 - Johan Walden, Han Ozsoylev, Deniz Yavuz, Recep Bildik. Investor Networks in the Stock Market. Review of Financial Studies.
2014 - Johan Walden, Jonathan Berk. Limited Capital Market Participation and Human Capital Risk. Review of Asset Pricing Studies.
2013 - Johan Walden, Christine Parlour, Richard Stanton. Financial Flexibility, Bank Capital Flows, and Asset Prices. Journal of Finance.
2012 - Johan Walden, Sebastien Betermeier, Christine Parlour, Thomas Jansson. Hedging Labor Income Risk. Journal of Financial Economics.
2012 - Johan Walden, Han Ozsoylev. Asset Pricing in Large Information Networks. Journal of Economic Theory.
2011 - Christine Parlour, Richard Stanton, Johan Walden. Revisiting Asset Pricing Puzzles in an Exchange Economy. Review of Financial Studies.
2011 - Rustam Ibragimov, Dwight Jaffee, Johan Walden. Diversification Disasters. Journal of Financial Economics.
2011
At Haas since 2005
2019 – present, Professor, Haas School of Business
2012 – 2019, Associate Professor, Haas School of Business
2005 – 2012, Assistant Professor, Haas School of Business
1999 – 2002, Management Consultant, McKinsey & Company, Stockholm, Sweden
1997 – 1999 Postdoctoral research associate, Yale University, Department of Mathematics
Schwabacher Fellowship
2010 – 2011
Earl Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award
2007, 2009, 2011, 2016
- Stochastic Calculus, MFE230Q
- Introduction to Finance, EWMBA 203