Assistant Professor of Finance Tyler Muir’s main research interests are at the intersection of asset pricing, financial intermediaries and financial crises. “I’m interested in the role financial institutions play in financial markets and how this may change over time as things like financial regulation change,” he says.
His recent work has focused on how the health of the financial sector affects variation in asset prices. Muir finds that an intermediary-based asset pricing model can help explain returns across assets previously considered anomalies. He has also examined the behavior of asset prices during financial crises using historical data over 150 years and 14 countries, and documented substantial declines in stock and bond prices, even relative to the declines in macroeconomic fundamentals.
Muir’s co-authored study on volatility received media attention for its findings that, contrary to conventional wisdom and practices, it pays to get out of the stock market in times of turbulence. “In these really volatile times, we find that investors’ future returns aren’t actually any higher than they are in normal times,” Muir told CNBC. “Our standard notion that high risk is equated with higher reward doesn’t seem to be true.”
Muir received his Ph.D. in finance from the Kellogg School of Management and his B.A. in mathematics from UC Berkeley. He was awarded the 2015 Amundi Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize for research published in the Journal of Finance. He joined UCLA Anderson from the faculty of Yale School of Management.
He enjoys traveling and outdoor activities, including winter surfing off snow-covered beaches — which he expects he won’t find in Southern California.
