David Thesmar


David Thesmar is a French economist who works as Franco Modigliani Professor Financial Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, after having taught finance at HEC Paris for over 10 years. His research interests include corporate finance, financial intermediation, entrepreneurship and behavioural economics. In 2007, he was awarded the Prize of the Best Young Economist of France.
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Biography

Education

David Thesmar earned a B.Sc. in economics and physics from the prestigious École Polytechnique in 1995 and a M.Sc. from the Paris School of Economics and ENSAE, followed by an M.Phil. in economics from the London School of Economics. In 2000, he obtained his Ph.D. in economics from EHESS for a thesis supervised by Pierre Cahuc, Francis Kramarz, Patrick Rey, Christophe Chamley and Daniel Cohen.

Career

After his graduation, Thesmar began to work as a lecturer and researcher at ENSAE before becoming Associate Professor of Finance at HEC Paris and being promoted to full professor in 2009. In 2016, following a short visiting appointment at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Thesmar moved to the MIT Sloan School of Management, where has been since working as the Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics and as Professor of Finance.

Affiliations

In parallel to his academic positions, Thesmar maintains affiliations with the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the Cercle des économistes and is a member of the European Economic Association, European Finance Association, and the American Finance Association.
Between 2007 and 2013, he was a member of the Conseil d'analyse économique, that advises the French Prime Minister.
Finally, he performs editorial duties for the Journal of Finance and the Review of Finance.

Research

David Thesmar's research interests include behavioural economics, entrepreneurship, productivity and banking. Therein, he has frequently collaborated with David Sraer. According to IDEAS/RePEc, he belongs to the top 3% of economists as per his research output. Key findings of his research include the following:
  • Thesmar and David Sraer find that French family firms listed on the stock market largely outperform widely held corporations, even if family firms are run by the founder's descendants, which they attribute to a workforce that is lower-paid but also more sheltered from layoffs, with increases in the supply of skilled labour or globalization increasing product market instability and exacerbating wage inequality due to raising skilled wages and possibly also depressing unskilled wages.
  • Thesmar, Landier and Robin Greenwood explain how negative shocks to the equity of banks with similar exposures can generate a fire sale of assets as banks sell assets in an attempt to return to target leverage yet depress asset prices in the process.
  • Thesmar and Greenwood find that stock price fragility strongly predicts stock price volatility, the correlation of stocks' fragility strongly predicts their price co-movements, and hedge fund trading may exacerbate stocks' fragility.
  • Thesmar, Sraer and Quentin Boucly find that, for French leveraged buyouts, targets become more profitable, grow much faster than their peer group, issue additional debt, and increase capital expenditures in the 3 years following an LBO, which they attribute to LBO targets becoming able to exploit growth opportunities through private equity funds' financing.

Selected awards

  • Prize of the Best Young Economist of France: 2007
  • Manpower Prize
  • Turgot Prize
  • Spängler-IQAM Prize