Vesa Pursiainen

Vesa Pursiainen is Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of St.Gallen. Prior to pursuing his academic career, Professor Pursiainen worked as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan and as an investment professional at Oaktree Capital Management.Management.

Expertise

Professor Pursiainen is combining behavioral and cultural insights with novel data to study financial markets. In recent work, he merges US data on financial market returns and on domestic violence to revisit the classical prospect theory, showing that large stock market losses during the week cause significant increases in domestic violence during the weekend, while large gains have little to no impact. In another stream of his work he is studying the role of technology in finance, and shows that banks with better IT capabilities were better able to shift customers from physical branches to digital banking services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further analysis shows that banks with better IT also originated more SME loans, attracted more deposits, and received better mobile customer reviews.