Seminar – Bank Risk-Taking & the Real Economy: Evidence from the Housing Boom and its Aftermath

Professor David Scharfstein, Harvard Business School

Speaker bio

David Scharfstein is the Edmund Cogswell Converse Professor of Finance and Banking at Harvard Business School, where he is also Faculty Chair of Doctoral Programmes. Scharfstein has published on a broad range of topics in finance, including corporate investment and financing behaviour, risk management, financial distress, capital allocation, and venture capital. His current research focuses on financial intermediation and financial regulation, including research on housing finance, financial system risk, bank lending and funding, and the growth of the financial sector. Scharfstein is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and currently the President of the American Finance Association. In 2009-2010, he was Senior Advisor to the US Treasury Secretary, working on policy related to the financial crisis. He previously was a member of the Financial Advisory Roundtable of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. From 1987-2003 he was a finance professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Scharfstein received a PhD in Economics from MIT in 1986 and an AB from Princeton University in 1982.