Koijen and Ludvigson New Co-Directors of Asset Pricing Program

Ralph S.J. Koijen of the University of Chicago and Sydney Ludvigson of New York University are the new co-directors of the NBER’s Asset Pricing Program, succeeding Monika Piazzesi of Stanford University.

Koijen is the AQR Capital Management Professor of Finance and the Fama Family Fellow at Chicago’s Booth School of Business. His research spans the fields of financial economics, insurance economics, and macroeconomics. He was awarded the Fischer Black Prize by the American Finance Association this year. The award is given biennially to the top financial economics scholar under the age of 40.

Koijen received his undergraduate degree in econometrics and his Ph.D. in finance from Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In addition to Chicago, he has taught at London Business School and New York University’s Stern School of Business. Koijen has been an NBER affiliate since 2010; he is a co-editor of the Review of Financial Studies.

Sydney Ludvigson is the Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Economics at New York University. She is also the chair of the Economics Department. Her research centers on the interplay between asset markets and macroeconomic activity, particularly the factors that determine the risk premia on stocks, bonds, and real estate investments, and the links between uncertainty and business cycle fluctuations.

Ludvigson received her undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and her Ph.D. from Princeton University. She began her career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and joined the NYU faculty in 2001. An NBER affiliate since 2003, Ludvigson has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, directed the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at NYU for nearly a decade, and was a board member of the Academic Female Finance Committee of the American Finance Association.