About

Douglas W. Diamond is the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he has been a faculty member since 1979. He specializes in the study of financial intermediaries, financial crises, and liquidity. Diamond is renowned for his groundbreaking research on banks and financial crises, which earned him the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). He has also served as president of the American Finance Association and the Western Finance Association, and is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Finance Association. Diamond is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, as well as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Diamond received his bachelor's degree in economics from Brown University in 1975 and earned his PhD in economics from Yale University in 1980. He has taught at Yale and held visiting professorships at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the University of Bonn. His contributions to finance have been recognized with prestigious awards including the Morgan Stanley-American Finance Association Award for Excellence in Finance in 2012 and the CME Group-Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications in 2016.

Research topics

• Financial system
• Economics
• Finance
• Business
• Monetary economics

Selected publications

• The Long and Short of Financial Development

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

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  By improving the pledgeability of returns to financiers, financial development enhances a producer's ability to raise capital to fund long term complex investments.Consequently, it should increase output and welfare.However, a general equilibrium analysis suggests this is not always so.We consider an economy where producers and consuming/financing households are distinct agents, where producers lack sufficient capital, and where households care about both pledgeable returns and liquidity.In this economy, the greater pledgeability of long-term project earnings can reduce long term production and overall welfare, even though it makes financing more accessible.Our results have implications for why economies face impediments to financial development and overall growth, especially when producer capital is scarce.

  PublisherDOI

• The Long and Short of Financial Development

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Long and Short of Financial Development

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Banking, Regulation, and Macroeconomic Outcomes

  Quarterly Review · 2025-02-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In October 2024, the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis organized the first event in the Macroeconomic Policy Perspectives conference series, “Banking, Regulation, and Macroeconomic Outcomes.” In what follows, we present the remarks made by Douglas Diamond, Andrea Eisfeldt, and Hyun Song Shin at the Policy Roundtable of the conference.

  PublisherDOI

• Nobel Lecture: Financial Intermediaries and Financial Crises

  Journal of Political Economy · 2023 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Financial system
  • Economics
  • Finance
  PublisherDOI

• Liquidity, Pledgeability, and the Nature of Lending

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Liquidity, Pledgeability, and the Nature of Lending

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2021-01-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We develop a theory of how corporate lending and financial intermediation change based on the fundamentals of the firm and its environment. We focus on the interaction between the prospective net worth or liquidity of an industry and the firm's internal governance or pledgeability. Variations in prospective liquidity can induce changes in the nature, covenants, and quantity of loans that are made, the identity of the lender, and the extent to which the lender is leveraged. We offer predictions on how these might vary over the financial cycle.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Liquidity, Pledgeability, and the Nature of Lending

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Liquidity, pledgeability, and the nature of lending

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2021 · 17 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Financial system
  • Monetary economics
  PublisherDOI

• Institutions, Games and Economic Theory

  Accounting Economics and Law - A Convivium · 2019-10-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article describes some of the amazing insights developed by Martin Shubik about the economics of money, trading and liquidity by commenting on his 2016 book with Eric Smith, The Guidance of an Enterprise Economy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Understanding Credit Crises

  NSF · $443k · 2010–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Raghuram G. Rajan

  Hoover Institution

  94 shared

• Anil Kashyap

  Centre for Economic Policy Research

  28 shared

• René M. Stulz

  13 shared

• Kenneth R. French

  Dartmouth College

  12 shared

• John H. Cochrane

  Stanford University

  12 shared

• Darrell Duffie

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  12 shared

• Matthew J. Slaughter

  Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research

  12 shared

• Frederic S. Mishkin

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  11 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Brown University

  1975

• M.S.

  Yale University

  1976

• M.S.

  Yale University

  1977

• Ph.D.

  Yale University

  1980

Awards & honors

• Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2022)
• Onassis Prize in Finance (2018)
• CME Group- Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Prize in…
• Morgan Stanley-American Finance Association Award for Excell…