Featured Researcher: Richard Townsend

Richard R. Townsend is a professor of finance at UC San Diego's Rady School of Management and an NBER Research Associate affiliated with the Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program. His research examines the forces that promote or impede entrepreneurship and innovation, with particular attention to early-stage investors, labor markets, and individual decision-making. A second strand of his work studies systematic financial mistakes by executives, investors, and households.

Townsend's research on venture capital has shown that investors can shape startup outcomes in several ways: Active monitoring improves innovation and the likelihood of a successful exit, while an investor's reputation helps young firms attract employees. His work also explores whether and why potential entrepreneurs start companies. He has studied gender bias in early-stage financing, how career risk and remote work affect entrepreneurial entry, and how economic downturns alter innovation and the flow of talent to startups. Related research examines how workers' household wealth and political sentiment influence innovative output, as well as how non-proportional thinking and confusion about interest rates affect financial decisions and markets.

His research has appeared in The Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, The Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, and the Journal of Monetary Economics. He has received the AQR Insight Award, the Journal of Financial Economics Jensen Prize, and the Arthur Warga Award for Best Paper in Fixed Income. Townsend earned a BA in economics from Stanford University, with minors in mathematics and computer science, and an AM and PhD in economics from Harvard University. Before joining the University of California, San Diego, he was a faculty member at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.