Benjamin E. Hermalin

Benjamin E. Hermalin is an American economist and university administrator. He holds professorships in the economics department at the University of California, Berkeley, and in Berkeley's Haas School of Business, where he is the Thomas & Alison Schneider Distinguished Professor of Finance. Since 2022, he has been Berkeley's executive vice chancellor and provost. In this role, Hermalin made the controversial recommendation to suspend a computer science lecturer over pro-Palestinian comments.

Early life and education Hermalin grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father was a professor of sociology and demography, and his mother was a fundraiser at the University of Michigan. He attended public schools in Ann Arbor before matriculating at Princeton University, where he majored in economics and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, graduating summa cum laude with a B.A. in 1984. He continued his studies in economics as a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and then as a Sloan Foundation Fellow, receiving a Ph.D. in 1988.

Career In 1988, Hermalin joined Berkeley's Department of Economics and the Haas School of Business faculty. During his tenure at Berkeley, he has been a visiting scholar, professor, and research fellow at several other institutions, including the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and the University of Oxford (Nuffield College). Since 1998, he has been Professor of Economics at Berkeley and, since 2006, he has been the Thomas & Alison Schneider Distinguished Professor of Finance at Berkeley Haas. The National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation have sponsored his research and scholarship.

Hermalin has served on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Literature, and, from 2010 through 2015, he was co-editor of the RAND Journal. He has been the National Bureau of Economic Research director since 2014.