Professor of Finance | Mitsubishi Bank Chair in International Business and Finance | Distinguished Teaching Fellow
Finance
About
Johan Walden is a financial economist and expert on risk analysis and financial and insurance markets, with a particular focus on portfolio risk diversification and risk regulation. He is a tenured Professor of Finance at Berkeley Haas, where he holds the Mitsubishi Bank Chair in International Business and Finance and serves as a Distinguished Teaching Fellow. He regularly teaches MBA, MFE, and executive education courses covering topics in finance, asset pricing, and financial engineering. He has also served as a visiting scholar at other top universities, including NYU’s Stern School of Business, UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, Oxford University, and INSEAD. Read More
Walden has published over 30 academic articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics of risk, diversification, asset pricing, and applied mathematics. His research has been published in the top academic journals in his fields, including the Journal of Finance, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Risk and Insurance, Journal of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Banking and Finance. His research on heavy-tailed risks and portfolio diversification in economics, finance, and insurance was published as part of the Springer book series Lecture Notes in Statistics.
Over the course of his academic career, Walden has received over 20 honors, awards, grants, and fellowships. He has presented his research at some of the world’s preeminent universities and finance conferences, including the American Finance Association and European Finance Association, among others. He also serves as a referee for many of the top academic journals in economics, finance, and insurance, including Econometrica, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Risk and Insurance.
His consulting experience includes complex corporate litigation, where he has authored expert reports and provided expert witness testimony on issues related to investment theory, risk, diversification, risk reporting and insurance. Before entering academia, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company’s Stockholm office, where he focused on corporate strategy, particularly within the telecommunications and financial institutions industries. Walden’s consulting experience also includes assisting government entities in assessing new programs and regulations. In 2009, he assisted The Congressional Oversight Panel in evaluating the Federal Reserve Board’s Supervisory Capital Assessment Program.
Expertise and Research Interests
- Asset pricing
- Investments
- Financial modeling
- Heavy-tailed risks
- Networks in capital markets
- “Visibility Bias in the Transmission of Consumption Beliefs and Undersaving, (opens in a new tab)” (with Bing Han and David Hirshleifer), Journal of Finance, 2023, 78(3), 1647-1704.
- “Distortions and Efficiency in Production Economies with Heterogeneous Beliefs (opens in a new tab),” (with Christian Heyerdahl-Larsen), Review of
Financial Studies, 2022, 35(4), 1775-1812. - “Payment System Externalities (opens in a new tab),” (with Christine Parlour and Uday Rajan), Journal of Finance, 2022, 77(2), 1019-1053.
- “Social Transmission Bias and Investor Behavior (opens in a new tab),” (with Bing Han and David Hirshleifer), Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2022, 57(1), 390-412.
- “Trading, Profits, and Volatility in a Dynamic Information Network Model (opens in a new tab),” Review of Economic Studies, 2019, 86(5), 2248-2283.
- “Mortgage Loan Flow Networks and Financial Norms (opens in a new tab),” (with Richard Stanton and Nancy Wallace), Review of Financial Studies, 2018, 31(9), 3595-3642.
At Haas since 2005
- 2019 – present, Professor, Haas School of Business
- 2012 – 2019, Associate Professor, Haas School of Business
- 2005 – 2012, Assistant Professor, Haas School of Business
- 1999 – 2002, Management Consultant, McKinsey & Company, Stockholm, Sweden
- 1997 – 1999 Postdoctoral research associate, Yale University, Department of Mathematics
William Sharpe Award for Scholarship in Financial Research
2022
Schwabacher Fellowship
2010 – 2011
Earl Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award
2007, 2009, 2011, 2016, 2023
- Stochastic Calculus, MFE230Q
- Asset Pricing Theory, PHD239FA