Matthew Baron

Biography

Professor Baron studies banking and financial crises. His main research agenda explores the causes and consequences of financial crises throughout history. Other published work explores 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. Professor Baron’s published work has appeared in a variety of academic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. He is currently 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 coauthors at the European Central Bank and University of Melbourne).

Professor Baron teaches MBA-level Investment and Portfolio Management and Behavioral Finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, along with co-teaching sections for the Cornell-Tsinghua Executive MBA program and for Johnson’s finance PhD 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. His research has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and other media outlets. His research is funded by grants from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), the Governor’s Woods Foundation, the Cornell Center for Social Sciences, and the Einaudi Center for International Studies. He has served as a visiting researcher at the New York Fed, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Professor Baron received a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and a B.S. 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" (in preparation).
• Baron, Matthew; Laeven, Luc; Pénasse, Julien; Usenko, Yevhenii. "Investing in Crises" (in preparation).
• 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).

Recent Courses

• NBA 5980 - Behavioral Finance
• NBA 5420 - Investment and Portfolio Management
• NRE 5060 - PhD Seminar - Corporate Finance Theory

Academic Degrees

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