Johan Walden
Professor of Finance | Mitsubishi Bank Chair in International Business and Finance | Distinguished Teaching Fellow | Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA, UNITED STATES
Areas of Expertise (4)
Asset Pricing
Heavy-tailed Risks
Networks and Capital Markets
Insurance
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 also serves as Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow and 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.
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.
Education (7)
Yale University: PhD, Financial Economics
Yale University: MA, Financial Economics
Uppsala University: Docent, Applied Mathematics
Uppsala University: PhD, Applied Mathematics
Uppsala University: MS, Business Studies and Economics
Uppsala University: MS, Engineering Physics
Uppsala University: BA, History
Links (3)
Honors & Awards (2)
Schwabacher Fellowship
2010 - 2011
Earl Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award
2007, 2009, 2011, 2016
Positions Held (1)
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
Selected Papers & Publications (13)
Trading, Profits, and Volatility in a Dynamic Information Network Model
Review of Economic Studies
Johan Walden
2018
Mortgage Loan Flow Networks and Financial Norms
Review of Financial Studies
Richard Stanton, Johan Walden, Nancy Wallace
2018
Equilibrium with Monoline and Multiline Structures
Review of Finance
Johan Walden, Rustam Ibragimov, Dwight Jaffee
2018
Comment on: “The intended and unintended consequences of financial-market regulations: A general equilibrium analysis” by Adrian Buss, Bernard Dumas, Raman Uppal, and Grigory Vilkov
Journal of Monetary Economics
Johan Walden
2016
Markup cycles, dynamic misallocation and amplification
Journal of Economic Theory
Johan Walden, Marcus Opp, Christine Parlour
2014
Investor Networks in the Stock Market
Review of Financial Studies
Johan Walden, Han Ozsoylev, Deniz Yavuz, Recep Bildik
2014
Limited Capital Market Participation and Human Capital Risk
Review of Asset Pricing Studies
Johan Walden, Jonathan Berk
2013
Financial Flexibility, Bank Capital Flows, and Asset Prices
Journal of Finance
Johan Walden, Christine Parlour, Richard Stanton
2012
Hedging Labor Income Risk
Journal of Financial Economics
Johan Walden, Sebastien Betermeier, Christine Parlour, Thomas Jansson
2012
Asset Pricing in Large Information Networks
Journal of Economic Theory
Johan Walden, Han Ozsoylev
2011
Revisiting Asset Pricing Puzzles in an Exchange Economy
Review of Financial Studies
Christine Parlour, Richard Stanton, Johan Walden
2011
Diversification Disasters
Journal of Financial Economics
Rustam Ibragimov, Dwight Jaffee, Johan Walden
2011
Teaching (2)
Stochastic Calculus
MFE230Q
Introduction to Finance
EWMBA 203
Social