Lawrence D.W. Schmidt

Lawrence Schmidt joined the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2018 as an Assistant Professor of Finance. His research uses a unique combination of theory and applied econometrics to offer a richer picture of risks faced by financial market participants—households, institutional investors, and financial intermediaries—and shed new light on underlying economic mechanisms linking financial markets with the real economy. Professor Schmidt is particularly interested in understanding factors which are associated with the risk and return to investments in human capital (that is, the present discounted value of labor income), and how frictions that limit risk sharing in the labor market affect asset prices and macroeconomic dynamics. Prior to joining MIT, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He received a Ph.D and M.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and a B.A. in Economics-Mathematics from the University of California, Santa Barbara.