About

Dmitry Livdan is a Professor of Finance at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, holding the position since 2026. He has been part of the Haas faculty since 2007, initially serving as an Assistant Professor, then as an Associate Professor from 2011 to 2026, and currently as a full Professor. His research interests include corporate finance, asset pricing, and market microstructure. Livdan's scholarly work has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Accounting Studies, and the Journal of Monetary Economics, among others. His academic background includes a PhD in Physics from The City University of New York and a PhD in Finance from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Throughout his career, he has received several honors, including the Schwabacher Fellowship Award and the Dean’s Scholarship for Distinguished Merit from The Wharton School. Livdan's research focuses on understanding financial markets, asset valuation, and corporate financial strategies, contributing to the academic and practical understanding of these areas.

Research topics

• Economics
• Monetary economics
• Business
• Microeconomics
• Econometrics
• Financial economics
• Financial system
• Market economy
• Finance

Selected publications

• Before the Storm: Firm Policies and Varying Recession Risk

  Management Science · 2026-05-04

  article

  Recession risk fluctuates substantially “before the storm,” yet little is known about how firms of different sizes adapt their policies accordingly. We embed time-varying recession risk into a model of liquidity management and investment, allowing firms to time their precautionary policies. Estimation reveals that small firms are less sensitive than large firms in their issuance, payout, and investment strategies to variations in recession risk. This is because small firms proactively build larger cash reserves relative to their current cash flow volatility during periods of low recession risk, anticipating that aggressive investment will gradually drain liquidity, grow cash flow volatility, and raise the risk of liquidation if a recession occurs. In contrast, large firms rely on robust cash flows to replenish liquidity during periods of low recession risk, deferring other precautionary actions until recession risk intensifies. These results have important implications for estimating the impact of recessions and macroprudential policy. This paper was accepted by Lukas Schmid, finance. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.08861 .

  PublisherDOI

• When failure is an option: Fragile liquidity in over-the-counter markets

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2024-05-21 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Markets can give false impressions of liquidity and stability if failed attempts to trade are ignored. For collateralized loan obligations, we quantify this bias by estimating the total cost of immediacy (TCI) which incorporates failure rates and failure costs. TCI is substantially higher than the observed cost, 0.3–3.8% versus 0.04–0.12% across credit-quality tranches because trade failures are frequent, failure costs are large, and failure costs and rates are correlated. TCI is almost double the realized gains from trade for low-rated tranches. Overall, auction-based over-the-counter markets become illiquid and fragile, especially during stressful periods for low-rated assets.

  PublisherDOI

• Life after Default: Dealer Intermediation and Recovery in Defaulted Corporate Bonds

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 5 citations

  • Business
  • Financial system
  • Finance
  PublisherDOI

• Managing Recession Risk

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Finfluencers

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Incentivizing Irreversible Investment

  The Accounting Review · 2021-05-28 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Existing dynamic investment models that show that a manager can be incentivized to implement the optimal investment policy rely on the assumption that the firm is operating in an ever-expanding product market. This paper presents an analytically tractable, discrete-time, neoclassical model with irreversible investment and the possibility of unfavorable demand events. We show that even when the principal is uninformed about changes in demand for the firm's output, there exists a performance measurement system that leads to goal congruent investment incentives for the manager. If the principal can observe the unfavorable demand events, then goal congruence can be achieved using very simple accrual accounting rules, such as straight-line depreciation. JEL Classifications: G31; M41; M52.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Investment, capital stock, and replacement cost of assets when economic depreciation is non-geometric

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2021 · 25 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Monetary economics
  • Microeconomics
  PublisherDOI

• Do We Need Dealers in OTC Markets?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Do we need dealers in OTC markets

  Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series · 2021-01-01

  article

  We examine technology enabling dispersed investors to directly trade with each other in over-the-counter markets via the largest electronic trading platform in corporate bonds starting Open Trading (OT) to allow investor-to-investor trading. Over our six-year sample, OT steadily grew to win 12% of trades on the platform, with 2% being investor-to-investor trading, 3% being dealers trading with new clients, and 7% being new liquidity providers acting like dealers. This suggests that investors in corporate bonds prefer intermediation to direct trade. However, OT can enable new dealers to compete in liquidity provision. OT's steady growth facilitates measuring its effect on investors, dealers, and competition to provide liquidity using an auction model.

  Publisher

• Quote Competition in Corporate Bonds

  The Journal of Finance · 2021-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Norman Schürhoff

  Swiss Finance Institute

  20 shared

• Terrence Hendershott

  University of California, Berkeley

  17 shared

• Lu Zhang

  Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital of Fudan University

  13 shared

• Dan Li

  Federal Reserve

  10 shared

• Alexander Nezlobin

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  7 shared

• Christopher A. Hennessy

  6 shared

• Amiyatosh Purnanandam

  Ross School

  6 shared

• Norman Schuerhoff

  6 shared

Education

• PhD, Wharton

  University of Pennsylvania

  2003

• PhD, Physics

  CUNY

  1997

Awards & honors

• Schwabacher Fellowship Award (2009–2010)
• Dean’s Scholarship for Distinguished Merit, The Wharton Scho…
• CUNY Research Grant (1996 – 1997)
• The City University of New York Scholarship (1991 – 1996)