Scott Weisbenner                                         魏思博

 

William G. Karnes Professor of Finance University of Illinois

Research Associate, NBER

 

 

Scott Weisbenner (魏思博) is the William G. Karnes Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois.  He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and has been on the Illinois faculty since 2000.  Before coming to Illinois, he worked as an economist for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in the capital markets section.  Professor Weisbenner was a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) from 2002-2009 and has been a Research Associate at the NBER since 2009.  He served as Associate Editor of Management Science, a top-tier general interest journal in management and business, from 2014-2017.  He also served as Editor of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, a journal focusing on the economics and finance of pensions and retirement-income programs, from 2010-2013.

 

Professor Weisbenner is an award-winning teacher at Illinois where he teaches MBA and MSF courses in corporate finance and behavioral finance.  He also teaches investment finance in the Executive MBA program.  Professor Weisbenner has been selected to the List of Teachers Rated as Excellent at the University of Illinois every year since 2002 and was the winner of the prestigious College of Business Alumni Association Excellence-in-Teaching Award for Graduate and Professional Teaching in 2011 (one winner selected in the College of Business).  He has also been recognized by students in the Master of Science in Finance program as "Best Professor" in the 2009-2010, 2010-2011, 2011-2012, and 2012-2013 academic years for his teaching in corporate finance and behavioral finance, was selected the Professor of the Year in the Executive MBA Program in 2013, and was selected the Professor of the Year in the Full-Time MBA Program in 2014.  Professor Weisbenner also teaches two online courses on Investments available on Coursera – “Investments I: Fundamentals of Performance Evaluation” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/investments-fundamentals) and “Investments II: Lessons and Applications for Investors” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/investments-applications).  His online offerings received the highest rating of any MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offered by the University of Illinois in both 2015 and 2016 and these two courses received the first and second highest Coursera-user ratings of any MOOC  offered by the College of Business in 2016. 

 

Weisbenner’s research studies household portfolio decisions and the financial and operational decisions made by corporate executives and other institutional managers.  It draws on a number of different identification strategies and data sets to provide insights on these issues, often with implications for broader questions in finance and economics.  To answer the questions posed by his research, Professor Weisbenner uses variation in the conditions facing households and institutions by geography, changes to tax and other policy parameters, and financial shocks

 

He has published articles in several leading finance and economics journals, including The American Economic Review (three times), The Journal of Finance (five times), The Journal of Financial Economics (four times), The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, The Journal of Public Economics (three times), The Review of Economics and Statistics, and The Review of Financial Studies.  His papers have won multiple "Best Paper" awards at various conferences around the world and his research has been heavily cited in the academic finance and economics literatures, with over 1,000 citations in articles published in journals listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (source: ISI Web of Knowledge) and over 4,400 citations in published and working papers (source: Google Scholar).

 

Weisbenner’s work has also been cited in numerous news publications including Barron’s, Business Week, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, Smart Money, The New York Times, The Wall Street JournalThe Washington Post, and The Washington Times.  It has been referenced in important government policy outlets as well, including the Economic Report of the President and briefings to the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee.

 

 

 

Profile (CV, publications, working papers, teaching record, etc.)

 

 

 

Contact Information:


University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department of Finance

340 Wohlers Hall, MC-706

1206 South Sixth Street

Champaign, IL  61820


Phone: (217) 333-0872
Fax: (217) 244-3102
E-mail: weisbenn@illinois.edu