Asaf Bernstein, PhD

Asaf Bernstein is an associate professor of finance at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Leeds School of Business and a Faculty Research Fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research. For 2021-2022 he will be serving as a Senior Advisor for Climate Issues for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Prior to joining Leeds he completed his PhD in Financial Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016. His interests generally lie at the intersection of policy and finance, with a focus on "Mostly Harmless Macroprudential Policy" (financial policies supported by plausibly well-identified reduced-form empirics), and include work in economic history, household finance, real estate, corporate finance, and asset pricing.
Professor Bernstein's research has looked at the effect of financial regulations and institutions, including the Federal Reserve, rating agencies, centralized clearing, and mortgage assistance programs. This work has been published in the Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and received numerous awards, including the 2019 AQR Insight Distinguished Paper Award. Based on his graduate work he received the 2016 AQR Top Finance Graduate Award by Copenhagen Business School, which recognizes the six most promising finance PhD graduates in the world. Prior to graduate school, he received his B.S. in Economics and Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and worked as a quantitative trader at an investment bank in New York.