Verdad Research Update

I am delighted to announce that Harvard Business School professor Samuel Hanson will be joining Verdad as a Consulting Economist. Sam started working with the Verdad team last fall, focused on improving the quality of our quantitative research and portfolio management.

Sam is one of the sharpest minds in academic finance. His work spans asset pricing, behavioral finance, corporate finance, and financial intermediation. He specializes in behavioral finance and credit markets. I first learned about the high-yield spread—and started thinking about the relationship between high-yield credit and equity—through Sam’s paper “Issuer Quality and Corporate Bond Returns,” which we wrote about in 2016. Sam has extended this work to show how credit market dynamics can help predict financial crises in his paper “Predictable Financial Crises,” which we wrote about here. We also covered a very clever paper of his on shipping markets called “Waves in Ship Prices and Investment,” which introduced a novel theory about expectational errors and competition neglect, which we wrote about here.

We are thrilled to be able to draw on Sam’s wealth of knowledge—and deep experience at the cutting edge of econometrics—as we work to improve the models that drive our investment strategies. Sam’s work has ranged from exchange rates and term premia to neglected risks and mortgage convexity, and we’ve found his insights helpful to a variety of our most important research areas.

Please join us in welcoming Sam to the Verdad team and our community of investors and friends.