Stephan Siegel

Corporate Risk Culture

Stephan Siegel, and collaborators Yihui Pan and Tracy Yue Wang, have examined the formation and evolution of corporate risk culture – the preferences towards risk and uncertainty shared by a firm's leaders, as well as its effect on corporate policies. They document persistent commonality in risk attitudes inside firms, which arises through the selection of leaders with similar preferences and is rooted in the founders' risk attitudes. Changes in corporate risk culture over time affect corporate investment policies, while cross-sectional differences in founders' risk attitudes, i.e., firms' initial risk culture, contribute to differences across firms in persistent firm policies, such as R&D intensity.

Mr Siegel's research interests are in international finance as well as individual investor behaviour. He has examined the globalisation of financial markets, the integration of European capital markets and most recently the pricing of political risk. His research in household finance has pioneered the use of genetically informed data to explore biological predispositions with respect to risk taking and investment biases. His work in "genoeconomics", the intersection of behavioural genetics and economics, has been presented at major academic conferences around the world and covered by leading news organisations, including the Economist, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

During his stay at the CESifo in October, Mr Siegel plans to work on a new news-based measure of political risk and its relationship to asset prices and capital flows.

Stephan Siegel is the Michael G. Foster Endowed Professor of Finance and Business Economics at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business in Seattle. A native of Hamburg, he earned a BS from the University of Bayreuth and a PhD in Finance from Columbia University. Prior to his graduate studies, he was a project manager with GCI Management, Munich, an international private equity and management consulting firm. During that time, he worked on turnaround projects in Germany, Italy, Portugal and China.