Ulrike Malmendier
2026 NOMIS Awardee
Cora Jane Flood Professor of Finance, Haas School of Business, and Professor of Economics
University of California, Berkeley, US
About Ulrike Malmendier
Ulrike Malmendier is a renowned economist studying how psychology and individual experience shape financial decisions. She pioneered the concept of “experience effects,” showing that lived economic experiences have a lasting effect on behavior — for example, those who grew up during the Great Depression remain financially cautious throughout their lives. Her research on overconfidence in CEOs and consumers has been foundational to behavioral corporate finance and establishing the field of behavioral contract theory.
Malmendier earned an MA in economics in 1996 and a PhD in law in 2000 from the University of Bonn and an AM and PhD in business economics in 2000 and 2002, respectively, from Harvard University. She has held positions at prestigious institutions, including Oxford, Princeton, and Stanford universities. Joining UC Berkeley in 2006, she became a professor of economics in 2012 and the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Finance at the Haas School of Business in 2023. She founded and directs Berkeley’s O’Donnell Center for Behavioral Economics.
