Reclaiming Finance for the Common Good: Financial Innovation and Helping Society (2012)

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Robert James "Bob" Shiller (born March 29, 1946 is an American economist, academic, and best-selling author. He currently serves as the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University and is a fellow at the Yale School of Management's International Center for Finance. Shiller has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) since 1980, was Vice President of the American Economic Association in 2005, and President of the Eastern Economic Association for 2006-2007. He is also the co‑founder and chief economist of the investment management firm MacroMarkets LLC. Shiller is ranked among the 100 most influential economists of the world. Thomson Reuters named him a contender for the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics "for pioneering contributions to financial market volatility and the dynamics of asset prices". Shiller received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1967, S.M. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1968, and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1972 with thesis entitled Rational expectations and the structure of interest rates under the supervision of Franco Modigliani. He has taught at Yale since 1982 and previously held faculty positions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota, also giving frequent lectures at the London School of Economics. He has written on economic topics that range from behavioral finance to real estate to risk management, and has been co-organizer of NBER workshops on behavioral finance with Richard Thaler since 1991. His book Macro Markets won TIAA-CREF's first annual Paul A. Samuelson Award. He currently publishes a syndicated column. In 1981 Shiller published an article in the American Economic Review titled "Do stock prices move too much to be justified by subsequent changes in dividends?" in which he challenged the efficient market hypothesis, which was the dominant view in the economics profession at the time. Shiller argued that in a rational stock market, investors would base stock prices on the expected receipt of future dividends, discounted to a present value. He examined the performance of the U.S. stock market since the 1920s, and considered the kinds of expectations of future dividends and discount rates that could justify the wide range of variation experienced in the stock market. Shiller concluded that the volatility of the stock market was greater than could plausibly be explained by any rational view of the future. The behavioral finance school gained new credibility following the October 1987 stock market crash. Shiller's work included survey research that asked investors and stock traders what motivated them to make trades; the results further bolstered his hypothesis that these decisions are often driven by emotion instead of rational calculation. Much of this survey data has been gathered continuously since 1989, and is available at Yale's Investor Behavior Project. In 1991 he formed Case Shiller Weiss with economists Karl Case and Allan Weiss. The company produced a repeat-sales index using home sales prices data from across the nation, studying home pricing trends. The index was developed by Shiller and Case when Case was studying unsustainable house pricing booms in Boston and Shiller was studying the behavioral aspects of economic bubbles. The repeat-sales index developed by Case and Shiller was later acquired and further developed by Fiserv and Standard & Poor, creating the Case-Shiller index. His book Irrational Exuberance (2000) -- a New York Times bestseller -- warned that the stock market had become a bubble in March 2000 (the very height of the market top) which could lead to a sharp decline. On CNBC's "How to Profit from the Real Estate Boom" in 2005, he noted that housing price rises could not outstrip inflation in the long term because, except for land restricted sites, house prices would tend toward building costs plus normal economic profit. Co‑panelist David Lereah disagreed. In February, Lereah had put out his book Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom? signaling the market top for housing prices. While Shiller repeated his precise timing again for another market bubble, because the general level of nationwide residential real estate prices do not reveal themselves until after a lag of about one year, people did not believe Shiller had called another top until late 2006 and early 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Shiller