Ulrike Malmendier

About Ulrike Malmendier

Ulrike Malmendier is the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Finance at the Haas School of Business, and a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, US. She is leading the project Stress and Economics — Exploring the Alleviating Role of Predictability and Controllability.

Malmendier earned an MA in economics in 1996 and a PhD in law in 2000 from the University of Bonn, Germany, and an AM and PhD in business economics in 2000 and 2002, respectively, from Harvard University in Cambridge, US. She has held positions at numerous prestigious institutions, including Oxford, Princeton, and Stanford universities. Joining UC Berkeley in 2006, she became a professor of economics in 2012 and the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Finance at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in 2023. She is the founder and faculty director of Berkeley’s O’Donnell Center for Behavioral Economics. She served as president of the American Finance Association in 2025/2026 and was a member of the German Council of Economic Experts from 2022 to 2026.

“Whenever I encounter a phenomenon I fail to grasp, I want to figure out what’s going on. This is particularly true for social phenomena. In physics, beautiful math equations can explain much of what is going on in the world. In economics, human behavior is far too messy to allow for that. I love thinking about our messy human behavior!“

— Ulrike Malmendier

Research focus

Malmendier is a renowned economist studying how psychology and individual experience shape financial decisions. She pioneered the concept of “experience effects,” showing that lived economic experiences have a lasting effect on behavior — for example, those who grew up during the Great Depression remain financially cautious throughout their lives. She has also shown that overconfident CEOs overestimate their ability to generate returns and people overestimate their future behavior when it comes to gym memberships. This work has been foundational to behavioral corporate finance and establishing the field of behavioral contract theory.

Her research spans behavioral economics and behavioral finance, corporate finance, household finance, and macro-finance, as well as the economics of organizations and contract theory. Her influential work on inflation experiences, behavioral biases, expectations and financial decision-making has been widely cited and continues to inform both academic research and economic policy. She is currently exploring how employers and policymakers can reduce the harmful effects of stress and economic disruption on the workforce during times of industrial restructuring, sectoral decline, and economic and financial crises.

Awards and recognition

Among Malmendier’s numerous honors are the 2013 Fischer Black Prize from the American Finance Association for outstanding original research in finance, the 2015 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Bessel Research Award, and the 2019 Gustav Stolper Prize from the Verein für Socialpolitik.