About

Andrei Shleifer is the John L. Loeb Professor of Economics at Harvard University. His professional contact information includes an office at Littauer Center M-9, with email ashleifer@harvard.edu and telephone number 617-495-5046. Additional support staff includes Polina Barker, located at Littauer Center M-10, with email polinabarker@fas.harvard.edu and telephone 617-495-4028. The webpage provides links to his CV, publications, working papers, presentations, books, classes, and contact information, indicating his active engagement in academic research and teaching. No further biographical or research details are provided in the text.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Economics
• Mathematics
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology
• Econometrics
• Statistics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• The Invention of Corporate Governance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Ads as Cues

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-10-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Ads as Cues

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The invention of corporate governance

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2025-06-18 · 12 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Invention of Corporate Governance

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-04-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  The analysis of corporate governance begins with a central feature of modern capitalism-the separation of ownership and control in large corporations-first empirically documented by Berle and Means (1932).Such separation entails several agency problems reflecting conflicts between managers and shareholders, such as self-dealing by managers, low effort, consumption of perquisites, and excessive growth and diversification.Berle and Means saw self-dealing as the central agency problem and stressed the law as the fundamental mechanism of addressing it.Jensen and Meckling (1976) considered the consumption of perquisites and emphasized private mechanisms, such as financial incentives for managers, to counter wasteful perks.Jensen (1986) instead focused on excessive growth and diversification, which led him to count on leverage and takeovers.The combination of public corporate governance mechanisms, mostly the law, and market governance shaped both theory and practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Finance without exotic risk

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2025-09-11 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Factors Shaping Macroeconomic Expectations

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-06-24

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Finance Without Exotic Risk

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-09-01 · 11 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  We address the joint hypothesis problem in cross-sectional asset pricing by using measured analyst expectations of earnings growth.We construct a firm-level measure of Expectations Based Returns (EBRs) that uses analyst forecast errors and revisions and shuts down any cross-sectional differences in required returns.We obtain three results.First, variation in EBRs accounts for a large chunk of cross-sectional return spreads in value, investment, size, and momentum factors.Second, time variation in these spreads is predictable, and proxied by predictable time variation in EBRs.This result holds even controlling for scaled price variables, which may capture time varying required return differentials.Third, firm characteristics typically viewed as capturing risk predict disappointment of expectations (and of EBRs).Overall, return spreads typically attributed to exotic risk factors are explained by predictable movements in non-rational expectations of firms' earnings growth.

  PublisherDOI

• Imagining the Future: Memory, Simulation, and Beliefs

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2024-06-27 · 42 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? Motivated by survey data on beliefs about COVID we collected in 2020, we build a model based on the psychology of selective memory. When a person thinks about an event, different experiences compete for retrieval, and retrieved experiences are used to simulate the event based on how similar they are to it. The model predicts that different experiences interfere with each other in recall and that non-domain-specific experiences can bias beliefs based on their similarity to the assessed event. We test these predictions using data from our COVID survey and from a primed-recall experiment about cyberattack risk. In line with our theory of similarity-based retrieval and simulation, experiences and their measured similarity to the cued event help account for experience effects, priming effects, and the interaction of the two in shaping beliefs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Inflation Expectations De-Anchor: The Role of Selective Memory Cues

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-06-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  In a model of memory and selective recall, household inflation expectations remain rigid when inflation is anchored but exhibit sharp instability during inflation surges, as similarity prompts retrieval of forgotten high-inflation experiences.Using data from the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations and the University of Michigan's Consumer Survey, we show that similarity can quantitatively account for the sharp post-pandemic rise in inflation expectations, particularly among the elderly.The memory-based model also accounts for how people estimate future inflation ranges and why they neglect infrequent experiences when forming point expectations.These predictions are likewise supported by the data.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robert W. Vishny

  University of Chicago

  313 shared

• Rafael La Porta

  John Brown University

  245 shared

• Nicola Gennaioli

  245 shared

• Simeon Djankov

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  174 shared

• Florencio López‐de‐Silanes

  SKEMA Business School

  136 shared

• Edward L. Glaeser

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  124 shared

• Florencio López de Silanes

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  100 shared

• Pedro Bordalo

  91 shared

Education

• B.A., Economics

  Moscow State University

  1985

• M.A., Economics

  Harvard University

  1987

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  1990

Awards & honors

• John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association…
• fellow of the Econometric Society
• fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• fellow of the American Finance Association