Kathleen Weiss Hanley joined the faculty in 2015 as the Bolton-Perella Endowed Chair in finance. She is also the director of the Center for Financial Services and the co-director of the Fintech Minor. From 2011 to 2013, she was the deputy chief economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the deputy director in the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis where she oversaw the integration of economic analysis into policy and rule-making across a broad range of topics in financial economics including the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. In addition, she managed the division’s research activities, data analytics and risk assessment initiatives.
Prior to that time, she was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the risk analysis section and a senior financial economist at the SEC. She has been on the faculty at the University of Maryland as an associate professor with tenure and at the University of Michigan as an assistant professor.
Professor Hanley serves as the executive treasurer and secretary of the American Finance Association and the executive director of the Financial Economists Roundtable. She is also an editor of the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy and was formerly the managing editor of the Quarterly Journal of Finance. She is a program fellow in the Program of Law and Economics of Capital Markets, a joint initiative between Columbia Law School and Columbia Business School. Her research focuses on capital formation, regulation and market pricing. It has been published in leading finance journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, The Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Accounting and Economics, and the Journal of Accounting Research.
Kathleen Weiss Hanley and Gerard Hoberg. Dynamic Interpretation of Emerging Risks in the Financial Sector. forthcoming Review of Financial Studies.
OFR/NSF Grant EAGER: III: CIFRAM: Dynamic Identification and Interpretation of Emerging Systemic Risks Using Textual Analysis (Gerard Hoberg, University of Southern California)
We use computational linguistics to develop a dynamic, interpretable methodology that can detect emerging risks in the financial sector. Our model can predict heightened risk exposures as early as mid-2005, well in advance of the 2008 financial crisis. Risks related to real estate, prepayment, and commercial paper are elevated. Individual bank exposure strongly predicts returns, bank failure and return volatility. We also document a rise in market instability since 2014 related to sources of funding and mergers and acquisitions. Overall, our model predicts the build-up of emerging risk in the financial system and bank-specific exposures in a timely fashion.