About

Jerome Lynch is the Fitzpatrick Family University Distinguished Professor of Engineering and a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University. He also holds the position of Vinik Dean of Engineering. His research interests are centered on advancing cyber-physical system architectures that integrate sensing, computing, and control to develop intelligent civil infrastructure systems. He is best known for his work in structural health monitoring (SHM), which involves using monitoring data to assess the performance and health of civil infrastructure systems to enhance safety and resilience. Professor Lynch's academic background includes a B.S. from The Cooper Union obtained in 1997, an M.S.C.E. from Stanford University in 1998, a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2002, and an M.S.E.E. from Stanford University in 2003. His contributions to the field have been recognized through numerous awards and honors, including the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the Structural Health Monitoring Person of the Year Award, among others. His work encompasses a broad range of topics related to infrastructure resilience, structural health monitoring, community engagement, and academic leadership.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Business
• Marketing
• Economics
• Public relations
• Management science
• Sociology
• Data science
• Mathematics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Statistics
• Econometrics
• Law
• Knowledge management
• Advertising

Selected publications

• Publication Bias in Financial Economics: The Case of Studies of the Effects of Financial Education on Financial Behavior

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Return extrapolation and dividends

  European Finance Review · 2025-03-14

  articleSenior author

  Abstract We provide evidence that dividend-paying stocks are less exposed to return extrapolation than non-dividend-paying stocks. In particular, social media sentiment and analyst price targets of dividend-paying stocks are significantly less sensitive to past returns. Our findings indicate that this difference stems from price changes playing a larger role in extrapolation and dividends diverting attention away from price changes for dividend-paying stocks. Consistent with models of return extrapolation, dividend-paying stocks earn lower momentum and long-term reversal returns. The value premium, however, is similar among both groups. Collectively, our findings suggest that return extrapolation is an important source of some anomaly returns.

  PublisherDOI

• Insiders Only: Are Our Ideas about What Makes “Good Theory” Holding Us Back?

  Journal of Consumer Research · 2025-12-07 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Consumer researchers often prize relevance but overlook how narrow assumptions about good theory limit it. Much work focuses on construct-to-construct theorizing, which involves introducing new constructs or new links among them. Far less valued is phenomenon-to-construct theorizing, which begins with real-world patterns and seeks to explain them by identifying the underlying active ingredient constructs. Examples include why GMO labels reduce demand or why drip pricing leads people to choose higher-cost options. Our survey of authors in four leading journals shows that most believe only construct-to-construct work counts as theory. We argue that this view is too narrow. Drawing on a Bayesian framework for updating beliefs within a theoretical network, we show that phenomenon-to-construct theorizing follows the same logic of scientific inference. Both approaches rely on established links in the nomological network to draw stronger conclusions about the focal link of interest. Using well-supported construct-to-construct mechanisms to explain real-world phenomena is therefore a strength, not a weakness. We clarify how phenomenon-to-construct theorizing differs from both “mere application” and “empirics-first” research. Embracing this form of theorizing can broaden the reach of consumer research by connecting abstract ideas to meaningful, actionable phenomena that matter to scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.

  PublisherDOI

• Frontiers: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Privacy Regulation for Consumer Marketing

  Marketing Science · 2025-08-05 · 3 citations

  article

  We discuss the quantitative marketing and economics literatures analyzing the benefits and unintended costs of digital consumer privacy regulation.

  PublisherDOI

• Comments on “Single paper meta‐analysis is unavoidable”

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2025-08-26

  article

  Abstract The method dialogue by Blakeley McShane and Ulf Böckenholt (2025) provides a strong critique of the way behavioral scholars have analyzed and presented their findings. The initial document was sent to four established scholars who agreed to provide open collaborative guidance to the authors. Following the accepted revised document, three of the four collaborating authors and others provide their final reactions below. Christian Wheeler summarizes and clarifies the recommendations of McShane and Böckenholt and assesses their effect on current research practices. He views that Single Paper Meta‐analysis (SPM) improves theory development in the social sciences by enabling researchers to better understand the inherent variability in empirical relationships. He believes the focus on point and range effect estimates can beneficially move research away from a dichotomized world to a theoretically richer one that articulates the credibility and magnitude of effects. John Lynch acknowledges the costly current practice in which authors intuitively summarize the aggregate evidence across multiple studies. He advocates a shift in focus from estimates of probabilities of null hypotheses towards meaningful metrics specifying the change in the magnitude of a dependent variable. He also counters the claim that SPM might be fraudulently used to promote false conclusions by asserting that it encourages disclosure of evidence and promotes better communication of the heterogeneity of results from different studies. The null hypothesis of zero effect is never true, and the goal of meta‐analysis should never be to test some null hypothesis of zero average effect. Wegener, Pek and Matthews celebrate the philosophical value of meta‐analyses for evaluating multi‐study empirical cases. They note that, especially in single paper settings, the hypothetical alternative of a true null effect remains a relevant hypothesis to reject, and SPM provides a more principled and accurate means of such assessments. SPM is better than human intuition at generating estimates of the aggregate effect across studies. As evidence, they show that researchers’ intuition influences perceived credibility of the aggregate effect across studies in ways that would not be justified by SPM. By providing a compact description of aggregate effects, SPM and related techniques can provide an improved assessment of the statistical reliability of a given effect.

  PublisherDOI

• Correcting the Record on Financial Education: Smaller Effects After Adjusting for Publication Bias

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Overreaction in Hedge Fund Flows: Diagnostic Expectations Versus Rational Learning

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Social Impact at Scale: Reflections on the Recommendations of the TCR Impact Task Force

  Journal of Public Policy & Marketing · 2024-05-09 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Financial Education Effects on Financial Behavior and Well-Being: The Mediating Roles of Improved Objective and Subjective Financial Knowledge and Parallels in Physical Health

  Journal of Public Policy & Marketing · 2024-01-11 · 15 citations

  article

  How does financial education lead to improved financial behavior and higher financial well-being? An influential Consumer Financial Protection Bureau model introduced in 2015 proposes that the goal of financial education is to improve financial well-being and that financial education does so by increasing financial knowledge, which improves financial behavior, which improves financial well-being. In this study, the authors test links in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau model, examining the differential roles of objective and subjective knowledge. They also test whether an analogous model might capture effects of physical health education on physical health knowledge, behavior, and well-being. They report a quasi-experiment comparing changes in financial and physical health knowledge, behavior, and well-being at two time points in a semester for students enrolled in a personal finance class, a personal health class, or neither. This study reports the first causal estimates of flow from financial education to financial knowledge to financial behaviors to a validated measure of subjective financial well-being. Financial education caused large changes in both objective and subjective knowledge. Yet only subjective knowledge mediated the large effects of financial education on changes in downstream behaviors. The authors find weaker but similar results for physical health. The findings suggest that financial education efforts should be refocused to foster subjective knowledge and improved behavior.

  PublisherDOI

• Diagnostic Expectations and Hedge Fund Flows

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• P. H. Hansen

  79 shared

• R.M. Turnbull

  University of Glasgow

  58 shared

• W. Wiedenmann

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  57 shared

• C. Raine

  University of Glasgow

  51 shared

• A. Falvard

  Laboratoire de Physique Corpusculaire

  48 shared

• A. Tricomi

  44 shared

• Donald R. Lehmann

  42 shared

• P. Gay

  Université Paris Cité

  42 shared

Education

• PhD., Psychology

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1979

• M.A. , Psychology

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1977

• A.B., Economics

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1974

• Undergraduate Studies, transferred without degree, Economics & Psychology

  Tufts University

  1973

Awards & honors

• Fellow. ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute. 2021
• Faculty Award. Civil and Environmental Friends Association (…
• George J. Huebner, Jr. Research Excellence Award. College of…
• Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize. American S…
• John F. Ullrich Education Excellence Award. College of Engin…