About

David Sraer is a professor at UC Berkeley, in the department of economics and the Haas school of business, where he currently serves as the chair of the finance unit. He holds the James J. and Marianne B. Lowrey Chair in Business. He is an editor at the Review of Financial Studies and a research associate at the NBER and a research affiliate at the CEPR. He was a member of the Economic Council of the French Prime Minister (CAE) from 2021 to 2024 and a co-Editor of Management Science in 2021 and 2022.

Research topics

• Economics
• Financial system
• Finance
• Monetary economics
• Business

Selected publications

• Replication Data for: 'The Effects of Mandatory Profit-Sharing on Workers and Firms: Evidence from France'

  Harvard Dataverse · 2026-04-17

  datasetOpen access

  The data and programs replicate tables and figures from "The Effects of Mandatory Profit-Sharing on Workers and Firms: Evidence from France," by Nimier-David, Sraer, and Thesmar. Please see the README file for additional details.

  PublisherDOI

• Financial Advisors and Investors' Bias

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Welfare Benefits of Pay-as-You-Go Financing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Financial Advisors and Investors’ Bias

  Review of Financial Studies · 2025-10-24

  articleSenior author

  Abstract We study an intervention by a brokerage firm providing advisory services to high-net-worth investors. In 2018, the firm changed the information displayed on its internal platform, so that financial advisors could no longer observe which clients’ holdings were in paper gain or loss. Using data on portfolio stock transactions between 2016 and 2021, we show that, while all investors exhibit a significant disposition effect before 2018, that is, a greater propensity to realize gains than losses, highly advised investors see their bias significantly reduced afterward. Our paper shows financial firms can successfully reduce clients’ biases by appropriately manipulating advisors’ information.

  PublisherDOI

• The Welfare Benefits of Pay-As-You-Go Financing

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-02-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Financial Advisors and Investors' Bias

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-08-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  We study an intervention by a brokerage firm providing advisory services to high-net-worth investors.In 2018, the firm changed the information displayed on its internal platform, so that financial advisors could no longer observe which clients' holdings were in paper gain or loss.Using data on portfolio stock transactions between 2016 and 2021, we show that, while all investors exhibit a significant disposition effect before 2018, i.e., a greater propensity to realize gains than losses, highly-advised investors see their bias significantly reduced afterward.Our paper shows that by appropriately manipulating advisors' information, financial firms can successfully reduce their clients' biases.

  PublisherDOI

• Financial Advisors and Investors’ Bias

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Effects of Mandatory Profit-Sharing on Workers and Firms: Evidence from France

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• How to Use Microdata for Macro-Finance

  Annual Review of Financial Economics · 2023-07-31 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Financial frictions generate misallocation of resources across firms by restricting productive firms’ access to capital. This article reviews the literature that estimates the aggregate losses generated by such misallocation. The first approach relies on structural estimations: A model of firm dynamics with financial frictions is typically estimated and used to compare efficiency in the actual economy with a counterfactual with perfect financial markets. We argue that robustness is a central concern for this structural literature and discuss ways to analyze robustness in structural estimation (using well-identified moments and analyzing sensitivity to moments). The second approach relies on sufficient statistics, namely formulas that measure misallocation using simple empirical statistics and that are valid for a class of models. We discuss key contributions in that space, the generality of this approach, and the conditions under which it is valid. Sufficient statistic approaches are simpler and more robust, but they come at a cost: The range of counterfactual analyses that can be explored is more limited.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How to Use Natural Experiments to Estimate Misallocation

  American Economic Review · 2023-03-30 · 37 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We propose a method to estimate the effect of firm policies (e.g., bankruptcy laws) on allocative efficiency using (quasi-)experimental evidence. Our approach takes general equilibrium effects into account and requires neither a structural estimation nor a precise assumption on how the experiment affects firms. Our aggregation formula relies on treatment effects of the policy on the distribution of output-to-capital ratios, which are easily estimated. We show this method is valid for a large class of commonly used models in macrofinance. We apply it to the French banking deregulation episode of the mid- 1980s and find an increase in aggregate TFP of 5 percent. (JEL G21, G24, G28, G31, G32, H25)

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Thesmar

  307 shared

• Thomas Chaney

  109 shared

• Augustin Landier

  HEC Paris

  30 shared

• Martin C. Schmalz

  28 shared

• Ron Kaniel

  University of Rochester

  21 shared

• Harrison Hong

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  18 shared

• Antoinette Schoar

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  12 shared

• Jean-Noël Barrot

  11 shared

Awards & honors

• Berkeley Haas "Club 6" member Award (2017, 2018)
• Brattle Prize in Corporate Finance Distinguished Paper (2018…
• TCW Best Paper Award at the 2014 China International Confere…
• Spaengler IQAM Prize for Best Paper published in the Review…
• TCW Best Paper Award at the 2012 China International Confere…