Kilian Huber

About

Professor Kilian Huber is a leading figure in the fields of Economics and Finance, specializing in corporate finance, asset pricing, and empirical finance. His research focuses on understanding the determinants of firm investment, the cost of capital, and the role of discount rates in economic decisions.

Research topics

• Economics
• Computer Science
• Business
• Labour economics
• Financial system
• Econometrics
• Finance
• Macroeconomics
• Monetary economics
• Physics

Selected publications

• Discrimination, Managers, and Firm Performance: Evidence from “Aryanizations” in Nazi Germany

  Journal of Political Economy · 2021 · 78 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporations. Firms that lost Jewish managers experienced persistent reductions in stock prices, dividends, and returns on assets. Aggregate market value fell by roughly 1.8% of German GNP because of the expulsions. Managers who served as key connectors to other firms and managers who wer…

  PublisherDOI

• Discrimination, Managers, and Firm Performance: Evidence from “Aryanizations” in Nazi Germany

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2021-05-01 · 30 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Large-scale increases in discrimination can lead to dismissals of highly qualified managers. We investigate how expulsions of senior Jewish managers, due to rising discrimination in Nazi Germany, affected large corporations. Firms that lost Jewish managers experienced persistent reductions in stock prices, dividends, and returns on assets. Aggregate market value fell by roughly 1.8 percent of German GNP because of the expulsions. Managers who served as key connectors to other firms and managers…

  PublisherDOI

• Estimating General Equilibrium Spillovers of Large-Scale Shocks

  Review of Financial Studies · 2022 · 28 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Large-scale shocks directly affect some firms and households and indirectly affect others through general equilibrium spillovers. In this paper, I describe how researchers can directly estimate spillovers using quasi-experimental or experimental variation. I then argue that spillover estimates suffer from distinct sources of mechanical bias that standard empirical tools cannot resolve. These biases are particularly relevant in finance and macroeconomics, where multiple spillover channel…

  PublisherDOI

• Are Bigger Banks Better? Firm-Level Evidence from Germany

  Journal of Political Economy · 2021 · 26 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in postwar Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after their relationship banks became bigger. In fact, opaque borrowers grew more slowly. The enlarged banks did not increase profits or efficiency but worked with riskier borrowers. Bank managers benefited through higher salaries and media attention. The results are based on newly dig…

  PublisherDOI

• Corporate Discount Rates

  American Economic Review · 2025-05-30 · 17 citations

  articleSenior author

  We construct a dataset of firms’ discount rates (i.e., required returns to capital) and perceived cost of capital using corporate conference calls. The relation between discount rates and the cost of capital is far below the one-to-one mapping assumed in standard theory, as it takes many years for changes in the cost of capital to be incorporated into discount rates. This pattern leads to large and time-varying discount rate wedges that affect firm investment. Moreover, increasing discount rate…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Elise Wright Knutsen

  13 shared

• Ülrich Flörke

  Paderborn University

  13 shared

• Claire Baskevitch

  Laboratoire d’études spatiales et d’instrumentation en astrophysique

  13 shared

• J. Borner

  13 shared

• Sonja Herres‐Pawlis

  Forschungszentrum Jülich

  13 shared

• Davide Manzini

  University of Pisa

  12 shared

• Dirk Kuckling

  Paderborn University

  10 shared

• A. Döring

  10 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of Chicago

  2011

• M.A., Economics

  University of Chicago

  2007

• B.A., Economics

  University of Zurich

  2005

Awards & honors

• Dawson Family Professor in the Wallman Society of Fellows
• NBER Research Summary on Discount Rates

Similar researchers at University of Chicago

• Anil Kashyaph-84
• Lars Hansenh-80
• Erik Hursth-68