Nationality German American Name Ulrike Malmendier | Fields Behavioral economics | |
Institution University of California, BerkeleyStanford University Alma mater Harvard UniversityUniversity of Bonn Similar People John A List, Malcolm Baker, Monika Piazzesi | ||
The Evolution of Organizations in Ancient Rome
Ulrike Malmendier (born 1973) is a professor of economics and finance at the University of California Berkeley. Her work focuses on behavioral economics, corporate finance, and law and economics. In 2013, she was awarded the Fischer Black Prize by the American Finance Association.
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IDEAS lists her as among the top 5% most cited economists and as among the top 100 young economists who started publishing 15 years ago. In the New York Times, David Leonardt named Malmendier as one of the 13 young economists who are the future of the field. Her work on behavioral biases in financial markets has been featured in publications including The Economist, Investors Chronicle, the New York Times, Barron's, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg, and The New Yorker. She has been profiled in The American Magazine and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Career
Malmendier earned a PhD in law from the University of Bonn in 2000 and a PhD in business economics from Harvard University in 2002. Andrei Shleifer served as Malmendier's adviser at Harvard. She worked as an assistant professor of finance at Stanford University from 2002 to 2006. During that time she held visiting positions at the University of Chicago and Princeton University. Malmendier moved to Berkeley in 2006 where she earned tenure in 2008. She currently is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and faculty research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor. In 2013, she won the prestigious Fischer Black Prize, presented biennially by the American Finance Association for significant original research in finance.
Work
Malmendier's work focuses on behavioral economics, corporate finance, and law and economics. She has conducted extensive research on CEO overconfidence where she found that overconfident CEOs invested too much money in their companies and pursued destructive acquisitions more frequently than other managers.
She has explored how behavioral biases affect financial decision-making in other contexts. Malmendier has found that people who lived through the Great Depression remain more frugal throughout their lives, a majority of people overestimate how often they will visit the gym, and that security analysts distort recommendations for profit.
Malmendier has also done research into the origin of shareholder companies. She has examined an early form of shareholder company in ancient Rome called the societas publicanorum.
Personal life
Malmendier is married to fellow Berkeley economics professor Stefano Dellavigna.