Finance Division

Letter From the Chair

Finance is at the core of making informed business decisions. Columbia GSB’s finance division provides a complete finance training with a carefully integrated core curriculum and over 100 elective courses to train students to manage their own finances as well as for career success in asset management, investment banking, real estate, financial technology firms, management consulting, and for roles in central banks and government.

Taught by award-winning faculty from all areas of finance, our professors bring a combination of research-based insights, theoretical frameworks, and practice-based understanding to the classroom. The curriculum focuses on merging the theory and practice of finance along three dimensions: understanding finance principles, an ability to use state-of-the-art data-analytical tools, and a deep knowledge of financial markets and institutions. The core curriculum provides the foundation, and then expansive electives provide more advanced and concentrated courses in the main areas of finance: investment management, investment banking, private equity, venture capital, and real estate.

Central to Columbia GSB’s finance training are Centers and Programs that curate the curriculum, connect students with alumni and industry, and mentor students along their career journeys. These include the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center, Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing, and Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate, which anchor our training in entrepreneurial finance, value investing, and real estate, respectively. These programs host many conference and events, and offer significant executive education, connecting our alumni and industry practitioners with new developments and insights.

Together, our program has a long track record of producing transformative business leaders, with Warren Buffett and Henry Kravis as two leading examples who’ve revolutionized the asset management and private equity industries. Our goal is to teach and mentor the next generation of business leaders in finance.

Michael Johannes

Ann F. Kaplan Professor of Business
Chair of Finance Division

In the Media

Entrepreneur

May 23, 2024

More People Are Exploring Entrepreneurship Because of This Unexpected Reason

Highlighted by Columbia Business School, this media piece showcases Topics and Areas of Expertise about our esteemed faculty. The content is specifically curated from the publication that showcased the mentioned faculty and/or research, emphasizing its contributions in various fields. The featured Topics and Areas of Expertise reflects the school's commitment to sharing valuable insights and knowledge.

Mentioned Faculty (1)

Angela Lee

Senior Associate Director: Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate

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The New York Times

May 22, 2024

Businesses in D.C. Blame the Government for the District’s Empty Offices

Mentioned Faculty (1)

Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate: Finance Division

Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate: Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate

Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate

Finance Division

Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate

Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate

Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh is the Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor of Real Estate and Professor of Finance at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, which he joined in July 2018. His research lies in the intersection of housing, asset pricing, and macroeconomics. One strand of his work studies how financial market liberalization in the mortgage market relaxed households' down payment constraints, and how that affected the macro-economy, and the prices of stocks and bonds.

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Crypto News

May 22, 2024

Why I’m a Single-Issue Crypto Voter

Mentioned Faculty (1)

Austin Campbell

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Business: Finance Division

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Quartz

May 20, 2024

How Florida and Texas Became the Wall Street of the South

Mentioned Faculty (1)

Tomasz Piskorski

Edward S. Gordon Professor of Real Estate: Finance Division

Tomasz Piskorski is the Edward S. Gordon Professor of Real Estate in the Finance Division at Columbia Business School. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and serves on the Academic Research Council of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Professor Piskorski earned a M.S. in Mathematics from New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and a Ph.D. in Economics from New York University Stern School of Business.

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Fortune

May 16, 2024

‘Banks Continue to Become Increasingly Less Relevant’: The Professor Who Sees a $2 Trillion Hole in the Economy Predicts a Thinning of the Herd

Mentioned Faculty (1)

Tomasz Piskorski

Edward S. Gordon Professor of Real Estate: Finance Division

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Forbes

May 3, 2024

Who’s Your Shareholder Clientele?

Mentioned Faculty (1)

Shivaram Rajgopal

Roy Bernard Kester and T.W. Byrnes Professor of Accounting and Auditing; Chair of the Accounting Division: Accounting Division

Chartered Accountancy, 1987

Shivaram Rajgopal

Roy Bernard Kester and T.W. Byrnes Professor of Accounting and Auditing; Chair of the Accounting Division

Accounting Division

Chartered Accountancy, 1987

Shiva Rajgopal is the Roy Bernard Kester and T.W. Byrnes Professor of Accounting and Auditing at Columbia Business School. He has also been a faculty member at the Duke University, Emory University and the University of Washington. Professor Rajgopal’s research interests span financial reporting, earnings quality, fraud, executive compensation and corporate culture. His research is frequently cited in the popular press, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes, Financial Times, Business Week, and the Economist.

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Research

The Macroeconomics of Stakeholder Equilibria*

Authors: John Donaldson and Hyung Seok E. Kim

Date: Forthcoming

Format: Working Paper

We propose one route to a more inclusive society. Our context is the prevailing one of high wealth inequality where stockholders alone supply the stochastic discount factor governing the allocation of capital. A large and pervasive pecuniary externality is thus imposed on non-stockholder workers, something we view as antithetical to the notion of an inclusive society.

Authors: Adam Michael Bauer, Cristian Proistosescu, and Gernot Wagner

Date: Forthcoming

Format: Journal Article

Journal: Climatic Change

We develop a financial-economic model for carbon pricing with an explicit representation of decision making under risk and uncertainty that is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. We show that risk associated with high damages in the long term leads to stringent mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions in the near term, and find that this approach provides economic support for stringent warming targets across a variety of specifications.

Authors: Michal Herzenstein, Sanjana Rosario , Elliot Oblander , and Oded Netzer

Date: Forthcoming

Format: Journal Article

Journal: Psychological Science

Using publicly available data from 299 pre-registered replications from the social sciences, we find that the language used to describe a study can predict its replicability above and beyond a large set of controls related to the paper characteristics, study design and results, author information, and replication effort. To understand why, we analyze the textual differences between replicable and nonreplicable studies.

Authors: Jesse Schreger , Pierre Yared , and Emilio Emilio Zaratiegui

Date: Forthcoming

Format: Journal Article

Journal: American Economic Review: Insights

We consider a New Keynesian model with strategic monetary and fiscal interactions. The fiscal authority maximizes social welfare. Monetary policy is delegated to a central bank with an anti-inflation bias that suffers from a lack of commitment. The impact of central bank hawkishness on debt issuance is non-monotonic because increased

Authors: Min Dai, Xavier Giroud , Wei Jiang, and Neng Wang

Date: Forthcoming

Format: Journal Article

We propose a tractable model of dynamic investment, spinoffs, financing, and risk management for a multi-division firm facing costly external finance. Our analysis formalizes