Ulrike Malmendier

Ulrike M. Malmendier (born 1973) is a German economist who is currently a professor of economics and finance at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on behavioral economics, corporate finance, and law and economics. In 2013, she was awarded the Fischer Black Prize by the American Finance Association.

IDEAS lists her as among the top 5% most cited economists and as among the top 100 young economists who started publishing 15 years ago.

Education +Places of Education UniversityDegreeUniversity of BonnBA, EconomicsUniversity of BonnBA equivalent, Law University of BonnMA, EconomicsUniversity of BonnPhD, LawHarvard UniversityAM, Business EconomicsHarvard UniversityPhD, Business Economics

Career

Malmendier was born in 1973 in Cologne, then in West Germany. Andrei Shleifer served as Malmendier's adviser at Harvard. She worked as an assistant professor of finance at Stanford University from 2002 to 2006. During that time, she held visiting positions at the University of Chicago and Princeton University. Malmendier moved to Berkeley in 2006 where she earned tenure in 2008. She currently is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and faculty research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor.

She was named Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2010–2012), and she received several Citations of Excellence by Emerald for her research (2009, 2006).

In August 2022, Malmendier was appointed by the German government for a five-year term as one of the five economic experts (known as the Five Sages) who make up the German Council of Economic Experts. In October 2022, she was a member of a panel which met in Berlin to discuss the reconstruction of Ukraine. +Positions Held

She has explored how behavioral biases affect financial decision-making in other contexts. Malmendier has found that people who lived through the Great Depression remain more frugal throughout their lives, a majority of people overestimate how often they will visit the gym, and that security analysts distort recommendations for profit.

Malmendier has also done research into the origin of shareholder companies. She has examined an early form of shareholder company in ancient Rome called the societas publicanorum.

Honors and awards In 2013, she won the prestigious Fischer Black Prize, presented biennially by the American Finance Association for significant original research in finance. In 2019, she was awarded the Gustav Stolper Prize by the German Verein für Socialpolitik. In 2021, she was named a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Personal life

Malmendier is married to fellow Berkeley economics professor Stefano DellaVigna.