Matthew Baron

Biography

Matthew Baron's main research agenda explores the causes and consequences of financial crises throughout history. Other scholarly work examines the effects of inflation on the banking sector, bank capitalization, investors' neglect of crash risk in the run-up to financial crises, and the effects of credit cycles on asset prices. Baron's published work has appeared in academic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. His research has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and other media outlets.

Baron is working on several new research projects on the dynamics of financial crises, the aftermath of credit booms, and the mispricing of tail risk by investors throughout history, in addition to writing an encyclopedia of the history of financial crises (along with co-authors at the European Central Bank and University of Melbourne). His research is funded by grants from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), Governor's Woods Foundation, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, and Einaudi Center for International Studies. He has served as a visiting researcher at the New York Fed, Federal Reserve Board, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Baron teaches Investment and Portfolio Management and Behavioral Finance at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, along with co-teaching sections for the Cornell-Tsinghua Finance MBA program and PhD in Management program. He has advised or co-advised a variety of students, including PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and full-time research assistants, who have subsequently placed at top academic institutions and central banks around the world.

Baron received a PhD in economics from Princeton University and a BS in mathematics from Yale University.

Selected Publications

• Baron, Matthew; Xiong, Wei. "Credit Expansion and Neglected Crash Risk"Quarterly Journal of Economics. 132.2 (2017): 713-764
• Baron, Matthew; Brogaard, Jonathan; Hagströmer, Björn; Kirilenko, Andrei. "Risk and Return in High-Frequency Trading"Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. 54.3 (2019): 993-1024
• Baron, Matthew. "Countercyclical Bank Equity Issuance"Review of Financial Studies. 33.9 (2020): 4186-4230
• Baron, Matthew; Verner, Emil; Xiong, Wei. "Banking Crises without Panics"Quarterly Journal of Economics. 136.1 (2021): 51-113
• Baron, Matthew; Muir, Tyler. "Intermediaries and Asset Prices: International Evidence since 1870"Review of Financial Studies. 35.5 (2022): 2144–2189
• Agarwal, Isha; Baron, Matthew. "Inflation and Disintermediation"Journal of Financial Economics. (forthcoming).
• Baron, Matthew; Dieckelmann, Daniel. "Historical Banking Crises: A New Database and a Reassessment of their Incidence and Severity"Leveraged: The New Economics of Debt and Financial Fragility, Ed. Moritz Schularick. University of Chicago Press. (2022)
• Baron, Matthew; Schularick, Moritz; Zimmerman, Kaspar. "Survival of the Biggest: Large Banks and Financial Crises" (in preparation).
• Baron, Matthew; Xiong, Wei; Ye, Zhijiang. "Measuring Time-Varying Disaster Risk: An Empirical Analysis of ‘Dark Matter’ in Asset Prices" (in preparation).
• Baron, Matthew; Green, Isaac. "The Aftermath of Credit Booms: Evidence from Credit Ceiling Removals" (in preparation).

Recent Courses

• NBAT 5900 - Advanced Topics in Finance
• NBA 5980 - Behavioral Finance
• NBA 5420 - Investment and Portfolio Management

Academic Degrees

• PhD Princeton University, 2015
• MA Princeton University, 2012
• BS Yale University, 2007