Andrea Eisfeldt

Biography

Andrea L. Eisfeldt is the Laurence D. and Lori W. Fink Endowed Chair in Finance and a professor of finance at UCLA Anderson, where she’s been teaching since arriving in 2010. She spent her first 10 years of her academic career as an assistant professor and then a tenured associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

“UCLA has an amazing history and tradition in finance, and I think that’s a huge draw because it’s a foundation we’re always building on,” Eisfeldt says about conducting research and teaching at UCLA.

During her time at Anderson, Eisfeldt has also enjoyed one 2-year leave and one sabbatical, providing asset management consulting for Structured Portfolio Management and AQR, respectively. Both positions offered her the chance to put her expertise in fixed-income and equity portfolio strategies to the practical test.

“It’s a lot of fun using ideas from the research frontier in asset management,” says Eisfeldt. “It’s important to get your feet wet in what you’re researching and teaching.”

Eisfeldt’s research over the years has focused on macroeconomics and finance, including research on market liquidity, the role of intangibles in asset pricing, bank valuation, and over-the-counter markets. Her papers have earned the Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper prize in 2004, the Jensen Prize (second place) in 2008, and the Smith Breeden First Place Paper award in 2013. She has also been awarded research grants by the National Science Foundation and the Banque de France.

Her recent research looks at how equity-based pay has impacted measures of the labor share and income and wealth inequality. She notes that “equity-based pay has become an increasingly important form of compensation for high-skilled workers below the C-suite. It is underestimated in standard labor compensation data sources. Equity pay changes prior conclusions about income shares, and about precisely how technological progress has impacted income and wealth inequality.”

Eisfeldt is on the board of the American Finance Association, where she is a member of the Investments, Strategic Planning and Ethics Committees. She is also on the board of the Society for Financial Studies Cavalcade, and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in its corporate finance, asset pricing and economic fluctuations and growth programs, and is a member of NBER’s Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. Eisfeldt holds editorial roles at the Journal of Monetary Economics, the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics and the Review of Economic Dynamics.

Education

• Ph.D. Economics, 2000, University of Chicago
• M.A. Economics, 2000, University of Chicago
• B.S. Economics, 1994, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign