Jonathan B. Berk

Who is Jonathan B. Berk?

Jonathan Berk’s research is primarily theoretical in nature and covers a broad range of topics in finance including delegated money management; asset pricing (the relation between stock returns and characteristics of the firm, such as accounting numbers, investment, firm size, etc.); valuing the firm’s growth potential, the firm’s capital structure decision, and the interaction between labor markets and financial markets. He has also explored individual rationality in an experimental setting.

Jonathan Berk is the A.P. Giannini Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. His research covers a broad range of topics in finance including delegated money management; asset pricing (the relation between stock returns and characteristics of the firm, such as accounting numbers, investment, firm size, etc.); valuing the firm’s growth potential, the firm’s capital structure decision, and the interaction between labor markets and financial markets. He has also explored individual rationality in an experimental setting. He has co-authored two finance textbooks: Corporate Finance and Fundamentals of Finance.

His work is published in leading journals in finance and economics; it has won numerous awards, including the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award, the Smith Breeden Prize, Best Paper of the Year in the Review of Financial Studies, and the FAME Research Prize. His paper, “A Critique of Size Related Anomalies”, was selected as one of the two best papers ever published in the Review of Financial Studies, and was also honored as one of the 100 seminal papers published by Oxford University Press. In recognition of his influence on the practice of finance he has received the Graham and Dodd Award of Excellence, the Roger F. Murray Prize, and the Bernstein-Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award. He served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Finance from 2000-2008, and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Jonathan Berk received his PhD in Finance from Yale University. Before coming to Stanford he was the Sylvan Coleman Professor of Finance at Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.