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LAWRENCE D. W. SCHMIDT

Victor J. Menezes (1972) Career Development Professor of Finance

MIT Sloan School of Management

I joined the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2018 as an Assistant Professor of Finance. My research is at the intersection of finance and macroeconomics. I use a unique combination of theory and applied econometrics to offer a richer picture of risks faced by financial market participants—households, institutional investors, and financial intermediaries—and shed new light on underlying economic mechanisms linking financial markets with the real economy. I am particularly interested in understanding factors which are associated with the risk and return to investments in human capital (that is, the present discounted value of labor income), and how frictions that limit risk sharing in the labor market affect asset prices and macroeconomic dynamics. In addition to studying the risk factors and behavior of households, I have also studied the behavior of institutional investors during financial crises.

Prior to joining MIT, I was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. I received my Ph.D and M.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and my B.A. in Economics-Mathematics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.