Samuel G. Hanson

Samuel G. Hanson is the William L. White Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Economics department. He teaches Finance 1 in the MBA required curriculum and Ph.D. courses in Corporate Finance and Empirical Methods.

Professor Hanson holds a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in Quantitative Economics and Philosophy from Tufts University. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he worked as an investment banking analyst at Lehman Brothers and as an assistant economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. During 2009 Hanson worked at the U.S. Treasury Department where he served as a Special Assistant and Liaison to the White House National Economic Council.

Professor Hanson’s research interests lie in asset pricing, behavioral finance, corporate finance, and financial intermediation. Hanson’s research has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. His research explores how investors’ behavioral biases and institutional factors affect the pricing of broad financial asset classes, with a particular emphasis on debt markets. He also studies how changes in the behavior of financial institutions have affected the stability of the financial system in recent decades and how the government might design policies to better safeguard the system’s stability.