David Thesmar

David Thesmar is the Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics and a Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He is an expert in corporate finance, financial intermediation, entrepreneurship, and behavioral economics. Recently, he has studied the impact of financing constraints on the real economy. Thesmar also investigates risk management and systemic risk in banking. He has also researched firm organization and non-rational decision making on corporate strategies. His work makes systematic use of large datasets but emphasizes a parsimonious modelling approach to address economic questions.

A native of France, Thesmar has been involved in policy advising both at the French and European level. He was a member of the council of economic advisors to the French prime minister from 2007 to 2013, and is currently a scientific adviser to the European Systemic Risk Board. An active participant in the public debate, Thesmar is the author of several books, and a regular columnist for the French daily newspaper Les Echos. He has also held numerous consulting positions in the private sector, with a focus on big data related topics.

Thesmar hold a BA in physics and economics from École Polytechnique, and a PhD from the Paris School of Economics.

Current Research Focus: Thesmar's research currently focuses on two areas. The first area is behavioral finance. This line of research involves studying the formation of investors’ expectations (both in the lab and in the field), the use of inadequate capital budgeting rules in organizations, and more recently running experiments to study the behavior of ESG investors. The second area of research is supply-side macroeconomics, where Thesmar studies how firm distortions (taxes, financing constraints, management errors) aggregate up to lower GDP and productivity at the country level.