Nicholas Barberis (Yale University)
Title: Behavioral Finance: The Science of Irrationality in Financial Markets
Nicholas Barberis, Yale University
Abstract: Going back decades if not centuries, it has been common to say that irrationality plays a role in financial markets. Behavioral finance, which has its roots in the 1980s, aims to study such financial irrationality in a scientific way by building mathematical models, making predictions, and conducting empirical tests. This talk will summarize current thinking about the most important types of irrationality that affect financial markets, and will also comment on new directions in the field, such as cognitive foundations and artificial intelligence
Bio: Nicholas Barberis is the Stephen and Camille Schramm Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management. He is one of the pioneers of behavioral finance, the scientific study of irrational thinking in financial markets. His research, which has focused on building psychologically realistic models of investor behavior, has been awarded the Paul A. Samuelson Prize, the FAME Prize, and the Jack Treynor Prize. He has also received multiple awards for his teaching, and has mentored dozens of doctoral students and junior faculty. Since 2015, he has served as the Director of the NBER Working Group on Behavioral Finance, and he is also the founder and lead instructor of the Yale Summer School in Behavioral Finance, which has introduced hundreds of graduate students to the latest ideas in the field. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard.
