Letter From the Chair
Finance is at the core of making informed business decisions. Columbia GSB’s finance division provides a complete finance training with a carefully integrated core curriculum and over 100 elective courses to train students to manage their own finances as well as for career success in asset management, investment banking, real estate, financial technology firms, management consulting, and for roles in central banks and government.
Taught by award-winning faculty from all areas of finance, our professors bring a combination of research-based insights, theoretical frameworks, and practice-based understanding to the classroom. The curriculum focuses on merging the theory and practice of finance along three dimensions: understanding finance principles, an ability to use state-of-the-art data-analytical tools, and a deep knowledge of financial markets and institutions. The core curriculum provides the foundation, and then expansive electives provide more advanced and concentrated courses in the main areas of finance: investment management, investment banking, private equity, venture capital, and real estate.
Central to Columbia GSB’s finance training are Centers and Programs that curate the curriculum, connect students with alumni and industry, and mentor students along their career journeys. These include the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center, Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing, and Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate, which anchor our training in entrepreneurial finance, value investing, and real estate, respectively. These programs host many conference and events, and offer significant executive education, connecting our alumni and industry practitioners with new developments and insights.
Together, our program has a long track record of producing transformative business leaders, with Warren Buffett and Henry Kravis as two leading examples who’ve revolutionized the asset management and private equity industries. Our goal is to teach and mentor the next generation of business leaders in finance.
Michael Johannes
Ann F. Kaplan Professor of Business
Chair of Finance Division
In the Media
First Republic Bank Acquired by JPMorgan: CBS Experts Weigh In on the Implications for the Banking System, Fed
Office Real Estate Is Getting Kind of Ugly
Bloomingdale’s CEO to Replace Macy’s Chief Jeff Gennette Next Year
Research
The Macroeconomics of Stakeholder Equilibria*
We propose one route to a more inclusive society. Our context is the prevailing one of high wealth inequality where stockholders alone supply the stochastic discount factor governing the allocation of capital. A large and pervasive pecuniary externality is thus imposed on non-stockholder workers, something we view as antithetical to the notion of an inclusive society.
Detecting Routines: Applications to Ridesharing CRM
Routines shape many aspects of day-to-day consumption. While prior work has established the importance of habits in consumer behavior, little work has been done to understand the implications of routines — which we define as repeated behaviors with recurring, temporal structures — for customer management. One reason for this dearth is the difficulty of measuring routines from transaction data, particularly when routines vary substantially across customers. We propose a new approach for doing so, which we apply in the context of ridesharing.
License to Layoff? Unemployment Insurance and the Moral Cost of Layoffs
This study presents moral cost as a novel behavioral constraint on firm resource adjustment, specifically layoff decisions that can cause severe harm to employees. Revising the prevailing negative view of managers as purely self-interested, we propose that managers care about their employees and incur moral cost from layoffs. We leverage expansions in unemployment insurance as a quasi-natural experiment that reduces economic hardship for laid-off workers and, in turn, the moral cost of layoffs to managers. We find that these expansions license larger layoffs.
Mitigating Disaster Risks in The Age Of Climate Change
Emissions abatement alone cannot address the consequences of global warming for weather disasters. We model how society adapts to manage disaster risks to capital stock. Optimal adaptation — a mix of firm-level efforts and public spending — varies as society learns about the adverse consequences of global warming for disaster arrivals. Taxes on capital are needed alongside those on carbon to achieve the first best.
Dynamic Banking and the Value of Deposits
We propose a theory of banking in which banks cannot perfectly control deposit flows. Facing uninsurable loan and deposit shocks, banks dynamically manage lending, wholesale funding, deposits, and equity. Deposits create value by lowering funding costs. However, when the bank is undercapitalized and at risk of breaching leverage requirements, the marginal value of deposits can turn negative as deposit inflows, by raising leverage, increase the likelihood of costly equity issuance. Banks’ inability to fully control leverage distinguishes them from non-depository intermediaries.
