Welcome!

I am a financial economist. My research spans the areas of behavioral economics and corporate governance.

My work in behavioral finance investigates how people form expectations about uncertain future outcomes. In a series of papers I investigate why and how peoples’ expectations predictably deviate from the rational benchmark. In “Measuring Under- and Overreaction in Expectation Formation” we develop a method to measure the extent to which people over- or underreact when updating their expectations in light of new information. In “Optimism Propagation” we empirically quantify how irrational beliefs propagate between people who communicate with one another.

My work in corporate governance mainly centers on the determinants and consequences of CEO dismissal and compensation. In “The Executive Turnover Premium” we document that CEOs are compensated for dismissal risk  via a wage premium. In “Product Market Peers and Relative Performance Evaluation” we show that relative performance evaluation is limited by the number and similarity of industry peers.

Apart from the work on academic papers, I maintain a database of involuntary CEO turnovers together with Alexander Wagner (University of Zurich). If you are interested in this dataset, please go to the “Data” tab on this web page. I have also written Stata programs relating to executive compensation which I make available on the “Code” tab of this web page.