Jonathan B. Berk, PhD

Jonathan Berk is the A.P. Giannini Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB). His research is primarily theoretical in nature and covers a broad range of topics in finance, including delegated money management; the pricing of financial assets; valuing a firm’s growth potential; the capital structure decision; and the interaction between labor markets and financial markets. He has also explored individual rationality in an experimental setting.

Professor Berk has coauthored two finance textbooks: Corporate Finance and Fundamentals in Finance. The first edition of Corporate Finance is the most successful first edition textbook ever published in financial economics and is a standard text in almost all top MBA programs around the world. At the GSB, he teaches courses in Institutional Money Management and Critical Analytical Thinking.

Professor Berk’s research is internationally recognized and has won numerous awards, including the Stephen A. Ross Prize in Financial Economics, 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 article, “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, is currently an associate editor of the Journal of Portfolio Management, and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Also, he is a member of the board of directors of the Financial Management Association.

Professor Berk received his PhD in finance from Yale University. Before joining Stanford he was the Sylvan Coleman Professor of Finance at Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He was born and grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa.