About

John Y. Campbell is the Morton L. and Carole S. Olshan Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1994. He has published over 100 articles on various aspects of finance and macroeconomics, including fixed-income securities, equity valuation, portfolio choice, and household finance. His books include Fixed: Why Personal Finance is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone, Financial Decisions and Markets: A Course in Asset Pricing, The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System, Strategic Asset Allocation: Portfolio Choice for Long-Term Investors, and The Econometrics of Financial Markets. Campbell delivered the Ely Lecture to the American Economic Association in 2016 and served as President of the American Finance Association in 2005. He is a Research Associate and former Director of the Program in Asset Pricing at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He holds honorary doctorates from BI Norwegian Business School, the University of Maastricht, the University of Paris Dauphine, and Copenhagen Business School. Campbell co-founded and serves on the board of Arrowstreet Capital, LP, a Boston-based quantitative asset management company.

Research topics

• Economics
• Monetary economics
• Finance
• Financial economics
• Microeconomics
• Mathematics
• Macroeconomics
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• Fixed

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-10-21

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sustainability in a Risky World

  American Economic Review Insights · 2025-05-29 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How much consumption is sustainable, if “sustainability” requires that welfare should not be expected to decline over time? We impose a sustainability constraint on a standard consumption/portfolio choice problem. The constraint does not distort portfolio choice, but it imposes an upper bound on the sustainable consumption-wealth ratio, which must lie between the riskless interest rate and the expected return on wealth (and if risky capital evolves according to a geometric Brownian motion, it lies exactly halfway between the two). Sustainability requires an upward drift in wealth and consumption to compensate future generations for the increased risk they face. (JEL D63, D81, E21, G51, H43, Q01)

  PublisherDOI

• Fixed

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-10-21 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Two leading economists reveal why today’s personal finance markets are rigged against us and offer practical steps to fix them We interact with the financial system every day, whether taking out or paying off loans, making insurance claims, or simply depositing money into our bank accounts. Fixed exposes how this system has been corrupted to serve the interests of financial services providers and their cleverest customers—at the expense of ordinary people. John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai diagnose the ills of today’s personal finance markets in the United States and across the globe, looking at everything from short-term saving and borrowing to loans for education and housing, financial products for retirement, and insurance. They show how the system is “fixed” to benefit those who are wealthy and more educated while encouraging financial mistakes by those who are aren’t, making it difficult for regular consumers to make sound financial decisions and disadvantaging them in some of the most consequential economic transactions of their lives. Campbell and Ramadorai describe how some even opt out of the financial system altogether, relying on unregulated and often shady mechanisms to implement necessary financial functions, with dire consequences for individuals, families, and the economy more broadly. With the explosive growth of the global middle class, longer lifespans, and greater numbers of seniors managing their money alone, the pitfalls of personal finance now affect billions of people around the world. Fixed proposes concrete solutions that harness the expertise of economists, the power of government, and the speed of technology to restore fairness and trust in our broken system and make it work better for ordinary people.

  PublisherDOI

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2025-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Bond-Stock Comovements

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Financing Institutions of Higher Education

  2025-09-15

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Economic Budgeting for Endowment-Dependent Universities

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Economic Budgeting for Endowment-Dependent Universities

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What Drives Booms and Busts in Value?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Who Owns What? A Factor Model for Direct Stockholding

  The Journal of Finance · 2023-03-07 · 52 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  ABSTRACT We build a cross‐sectional factor model for investors' direct stockholdings and estimate it using data from almost 10 million retail accounts in the Indian stock market. Our model identifies strong investor clienteles for stock characteristics, most notably firm age and share price, and for particular clusters of stock characteristics. These clienteles are intuitively associated with investor attributes such as account age, size, and diversification. Coheld stocks tend to have higher return covariance, inconsistent with simple models of diversification but suggestive that clientele demands influence stock returns.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Normative Studies of Portfolio Choice and Risk Management

  NSF · $246k · 2002–2007

Frequent coauthors

• Tarun Ramadorai

  Center for Economic and Policy Research

  112 shared

• Luis M. Viceira

  83 shared

• John H. Cochrane

  Stanford University

  82 shared

• Yeung L. Chan

  65 shared

• Malkiel Burton

  52 shared

• Lettau Martin

  52 shared

• Xu Yexiao

  52 shared

• Robert J. Shiller

  Yale University

  49 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1978

• B.A., Economics

  Harvard University

  1973

Awards & honors

• Ely Lecture to the American Economic Association in 2016
• Fellow of the Econometric Society
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy
• Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford