Amir Kermani

About

Amir Kermani holds the Kingsford Capital Management Chair in Finance at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 2013 and is a faculty research fellow at the NBER. His research interests include monetary policy, household finance, financial intermediation, and political economy. Since joining Haas in 2013, he has held positions as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and now Professor. His work has contributed to understanding the mechanisms of quantitative easing, the relationship between stock market returns and consumption, interest rate pass-through effects on household behavior, the value of trading relations during turbulent times, credit-induced economic cycles, and the impact of connections in financial markets. Kermani's background includes a MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics, a MSc in Managerial Economics from Sharif University of Technology, and a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran.

Research topics

• Economics
• Sociology
• Finance
• Political Science
• Business
• Economic growth
• Financial system
• Financial economics
• Demographic economics
• Monetary economics

Selected publications

• Stock Market Returns and Consumption

  The Journal of Finance · 2020 · 198 citations

  ABSTRACT This paper employs Swedish data on households' stock holdings to investigate how consumption responds to changes in stock market returns. We instrument the actual capital gains and dividend payments with past portfolio weights. Unrealized capital gains lead to a marginal propensity to consume of 23% for the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution and about 3% for the top 30% of the wealth distribution. Household consumption is significantly more responsive to dividend payouts across all p…

  DOI

• Asset Specificity of Nonfinancial Firms

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2022-07-29 · 87 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We develop a new data set to study asset specificity among nonfinancial firms. Our data cover the liquidation values of each category of assets on firms’ balance sheets and provides information across major industries. First, we find that nonfinancial firms have high asset specificity. For example, the liquidation value of fixed assets is 35% of the net book value in the average industry. Second, we analyze the determinants of asset specificity and document that assets’ physical attribu…

  PublisherDOI

• Racial Disparities in Housing Returns

  2021 · 66 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  We document the existence of a racial gap in realized housing returns that is an order of magnitude larger than disparities arising from housing costs alone, and is driven by differences in distressed home sales (i.e., foreclosures and short sales). Black and Hispanic homeowners are both more likely to experience a distressed sale and to live in neighborhoods where distressed sales erase more house value. However, absent financial distress, houses owned by minorities do not appreciate at substan…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The pass-through of uncertainty shocks to households

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2022-05-08 · 33 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Using new employer-employee matched data, this paper investigates the impact of uncertainty, as measured by idiosyncratic stock market volatility, on individual outcomes. We find that firms provide at best partial insurance to their workers. Increased firm-level uncertainty reduces total compensation, especially variable pay, and workers reduce their durable goods consumption in response. Such shocks also lead to greater financial fragility among lower-income earners. Constructing a new county-l…

  PublisherDOI

• Return Migration and Human Capital Flows

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-04-01 · 18 citations

  reportOpen access

  We bring to bear a novel dataset covering the employment history of about 450 million individuals from 180 countries to study return migration and the impact of skilled international migration on human capital stocks across countries. Return migration is a common phenomenon, with 38% of skilled migrants returning to their origin countries within 10 years. Return migration is significantly correlated with industry growth in the origin and destination countries, and is asymmetrically exposed to ne…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Marco Di Maggio

  62 shared

• Daron Acemoğlu

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  43 shared

• Simon Johnson

  New School

  41 shared

• Todd Mitton

  Brigham Young University

  39 shared

• James Kwak

  39 shared

• Zhaogang Song

  22 shared

• Kaveh Majlesi

  Monash University

  17 shared

• Rodney Ramcharan

  University of Southern California

  14 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

  2013

Awards & honors

• RFS Rising Scholar Award (2018)
• MIT Department of Economics Fellowship
• HAND Foundation Scholarship
• Gold Medal of 33rd International Physics Olympiad IPhO (2002…

Similar researchers at University of California, Berkeley

• Enrico Morettih-72
• Antoine Levyh-38
• Richard H. Stantonh-34