Asaf Bernstein

Asaf Bernstein is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, a Faculty Scholar, Co-Director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He earned his Ph.D. in Financial Economics from MIT in 2016 and served as Senior Academic Advisor on Climate Issues to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission during 2021-22.

Education:

• Ph.D. Financial Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016
• B.S. Economics & Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College

Research Focus:
Bernstein’s work lies at the intersection of policy and finance, using plausibly identified empirical designs to study financial regulation, climate risk, household balance-sheet dynamics, and the real effects of credit markets. His current agenda spans macro-prudential policy, public-pension wealth transmission, historical introduction of credit ratings, and partisan sorting under climate change.

Publication Trends:
Across more than a dozen forthcoming or published papers, Bernstein consistently exploits natural experiments—regulatory shocks, historical clearinghouses, Dutch amortization reform, Great-Depression bank distress, SLR exposure—to quantify how financial frictions affect prices, allocations, and innovation. The corpus maps broadly onto household finance, corporate finance, and climate-finance fields, with frequent overlap in real-estate and financial-history contexts.

Honors & Awards:

• 2019 AQR Insight Distinguished Paper Award
• 2016 AQR Top Finance Graduate Award (global top-six PhD honor)
• 2022 Brattle Group Distinguished Paper Prize, Journal of Finance
• 2018 Northern Finance Association Best Paper in Risk Management
• Kahle Family Research Award

Grants & Advising:
While specific grant amounts are not disclosed, his projects have been supported by data access from Dutch administrative panels, U.S. credit-bureau micro-data, and historical securities archives. He advises PhD students in empirical finance and climate-economics and collaborates extensively across Leeds, NBER, MIT, and Stanford networks.

Centers & Labs:
Bernstein co-leads the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at Leeds, an interdisciplinary lab linking finance, real-estate, and public-policy scholars to external regulatory partners including the SEC, Federal Reserve, and FINRA.