Robert J. Shiller - Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences and Professor of Economics at Yale University

Robert J. Shiller, American economist and Professor of Economics at Yale University, has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economic Sciences for his pioneering contributions to financial market volatility and the dynamics of asset prices. Shiller is consistently ranked among the most influential economists of our time.

Robert Shiller is known as the founder of “behavioral finance” research, which focuses on the irrational human behavior in economic situations trying to dissolve the assumption of Homo Economicus as a rationally thinking person. The observed behaviors usually contradict the predictions of classical economic models, which is why "behavioral finance" studies these irrational behaviors. It applies psychology and other social sciences to the world of finance and thus addresses a fundamental weakness of this discipline dominated by mathematics: the neglect of the people.

Shiller argues that stock market movements do not reflect underlying economic reality and that the volatility of the market makes the financial system unstable. He came to national prominence with the publication of Irrational Exuberance in 2000. The book, which quickly became a bestseller, described speculative bubbles fueled by mass misinformation and herd instinct, and accurately predicted the dot.com implosion. As early as 2003, Shiller warned of the housing market collapse, and later wrote a precept for recovery, Subprime Solution: How the Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do About It.

Irrational Exuberance won the 2000 Commonfund Prize for Best Contribution to Endowment Management Research. In 2009 he co-authored, with Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, which received the International Book Award and the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security. His latest book, Finance and the Good Society, published in 2012, won the Prose Award for Business, Finance, and Management.

In a special 2011 issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine, Shiller was ranked as one of the “50 Most Influential People with the Power in Global Finance,” and in 2010 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. The German newspaper, Die Zeit, cited Shiller as one of 21 thinkers for the 21st  century. In 2009 the economist was awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics for his pioneering research in the field of financial economics, relating to such asset prices as fixed income, equities, and real estate. Shiller recently received the CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications for 2012.

Shiller has served on a number of boards and advisory panels, including the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, The Economic Advisory Panel for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and The World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Fiscal Crises.

Check out some of the other speakers during the 41st Annual Meeting: UBS Panel Session, SFI Industry Forum