Email: baron@cornell.edu
401J Sage Hall
Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-6201
Phone: 607-255-8686
Professor Baron studies banking and financial crises. His main research agenda explores the causes and consequences of financial crises throughout history. Other published work explores the effects of inflation on the banking sector, bank capitalization, investors’ neglect of crash risk in the run-up to financial crises, and the effects of credit cycles on asset prices. Professor Baron’s published work has appeared in a variety of academic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. He is currently working on several new research projects on the dynamics of financial crises, the aftermath of credit booms, and the mispricing of tail risk by investors throughout history, in addition to writing an encyclopedia of the history of financial crises (along with coauthors at the European Central Bank and University of Melbourne). More about his work on historical financial crises can be found at the website of the Quantitative Financial History Lab at Cornell University.
Professor Baron teaches MBA-level Investment and Portfolio Management and Behavioral Finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, along with co-teaching sections for the Cornell-Tsinghua Executive MBA program and for Johnson’s finance PhD program. He has advised or co-advised a variety of students, including PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and full-time research assistants, who have subsequently placed at top academic institutions and central banks around the world. His research has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and other media outlets. His research is funded by grants from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), the Governor’s Woods Foundation, the Cornell Center for Social Sciences, and the Einaudi Center for International Studies. He has served as a visiting researcher at the New York Fed, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Professor Baron received a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and a B.S. in Mathematics from Yale University.
Curriculum Vitae (CV)
- Click here to view my curriculum vitae (PDF document).
Peer-reviewed Publications
- Matthew Baron and Wei Xiong. “Credit Expansion and Neglected Crash Risk”
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132.2 (2017): 713-764. Online Appendix here.
_ - Matthew Baron, Jonathan Brogaard, Björn Hagströmer, and Andrei Kirilenko. “Risk and Return in High Frequency Trading”,
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 54.3 (2019): 993-1024.
_ - Matthew Baron. “Countercyclical Bank Equity Issuance”
Review of Financial Studies, 33.9 (2020): 4186–4230.
_ - Matthew Baron, Emil Verner, and Wei Xiong. “Banking Crises without Panics”
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 136.1 (2021): 51–113.
– Download: BVX Crisis List, Historical documentation, Full data and replication kit.
_ - Matthew Baron and Tyler Muir. “Intermediaries and Asset Prices: International Evidence since 1870”
Review of Financial Studies, 35.5 (2022): 2144–2189.
_ - Isha Agarwal and Matthew Baron. “Inflation and Disintermediation”
Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming.
Working Papers__
- Matthew Baron, Luc Laeven, Julien Pénasse, and Yevhenii Usenko. “Investing in Crises”
Reject and Resubmit at the Quarterly Journal of Economics
_ - Matthew Baron, Wei Xiong, and Zhijiang Ye. “Measuring Time-Varying Disaster Risk: An Empirical Analysis of ‘Dark Matter’ in Asset Prices”
Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Finance
_
- Matthew Baron, Moritz Schularick, and Kaspar Zimmermann. “Survival of the Biggest: Large Banks and Financial Crises”_
_ - Matthew Baron, Zhou Fan and Jamil Rahman. “Credit Cycles and Asset Price Bubbles”
_ - Matthew Baron and Isaac Green. “The Aftermath of Credit Booms: Evidence from Credit Ceiling Removals”
Book Chapters
- Matthew Baron and Daniel Dieckelmann. “Historical Banking Crises: A New Database and a Reassessment of their Incidence and Severity”
in Leveraged: The New Economics of Debt and Financial Fragility. (ed.: Moritz Schularick) University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Projects in the works_
- “Beyond Boom and Bust: Causes of Banking Crises since 1870” with Daniel Dieckelmann
_
Links
- Historical Banking Crises Database (work in progress)
- Google Scholar
Teaching
- I currently teach two MBA classes at Cornell, NBA 5420: Investment and Portfolio Management and NBA 5980: Behavioral Finance. Click here to go to my teaching page.