A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility

Welcome to the Eli F. Heckscher lecture 28 May at 17.15-18.45

Keynote speaker: Andrei Shleifer, Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Shleifer holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from MIT. Before coming to Harvard in 1991, he has taught at Princeton and the Chicago Business School.

Shleifer has worked in the areas of comparative corporate governance, law and finance, behavioral finance, as well as institutional economics. He has published six books, including The Grabbing Hand (with Robert Vishny), and Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance, as well as over a hundred articles. Shleifer is an Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Finance Association. In 1999, Shleifer won the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association. According to RePEc, Shleifer is the most cited economist in the world.

His new book A Crisis of Beliefs: Investor Psychology and Financial Fragility (with Nicola Gennaioli), forthcoming at Princeton University Press, investigates the beliefs of investors and regulators that shape financial markets. It shows that extrapolation of the past and neglect of unrepresentative risks characterize investor expectations across financial markets. This helps explain the beliefs around the financial crisis of 2008, and credit cycles and financial fragility more generally.

Date: Monday 28 May
Time: 17.15-18.45
Place: Stockholm School of Economics, Sveavägen 65, Stockholm
Room: Aulan

No registration required.

Welcome!
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The Heckscher Lecture is arranged each year by The EHFF Institute for Economic and Business History Research and The Ratio Institute, to honor Professor Eli F. Heckscher and his work. Heckscher was active at the Stockholm School of Economics as an economist and economic – historian and he was a leading scholar in those subjects for half a century. His work was mainly focused on economic theory and methods, Swedish economic history and institutional economic analyses. He is most famous for co-developing the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem in international economics.