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Welcome to the webpage of Klaas Mulier

Klaas is Associate Professor of Finance at Ghent University but you also often find him in the National Bank of Belgium as a visiting researcher. He spent the academic year '21/'22 at the finance department of HEC Paris as visiting professor. He has published in leading international journals, such as for instance Management Science, the Review of Finance, and the Journal of Financial Intermediation.

Klaas co-founded the Empirical Financial Intermediation (EFI) network  with Mike Mariathasan (KU Leuven) and Olivier De Jonghe (NBB, ECB, Tilburg Uni). The aim of the EFI network is to organize small workshops on empirical financial intermediation during which researchers receive ample time to present and receive feedback on their work in a friendly atmosphere. 

Accepted for publication:  Interpretable Business Failure Prediction 

Machine learning (ML) models show great potential for solving economic prediction problems. However, their use in real-life applications (like business failure prediction) tends to lag because most ML models remain a black box. We build a  model that uses financial and textual information of large U.S. firms to predict business failure and which highlights sentences from the text whenever the model deems a sentence relevant for its prediction, as indicated by an attention score assigned by the model. This gives our ML model a high level of 'interpretability', increasing the likelihood of adopting such models in real-life cases, such as for instance bankruptcy rulings by judges.  

His main areas of interest are:

• financial intermediation

• corporate finance

Klaas teaches the following courses:

• Financial Modeling (F000890)

• Advanced Corporate Finance (F000693)