Greenwood received a B.S. in Economics and Mathematics at MIT in 1998, before receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in Economics in 2003.[1][2] During his Ph.D., Greenwood spent time as a post-doctoral Fellow at Harvard Business School, before becoming an Assistant Professor of Business Administration there in 2003. He has remained a member of the school's faculty since, though was a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in 2007, and a Schoen Scholar at Yale University in 2008. Greenwood became a full professor in 2012.[3][4] He also spent time, between 2018 and 2021, as head of the Finance Unit at Harvard Business School, and was formerly chair of the Business Economics PhD program.[1]
Other work includes the role of institutional finance and the 'financialisation' of the economy, as well as private sector impacts on the economy, where a series of articles increased interest in investor expectations.[a][19][20][21] For his work on an extrapolative capital asset pricing model, the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance awarded him the Jack Treynor Prize in 2014.[22]
Behavioral finance & financial stability
Greenwood also spent time as the faculty director of the Behavioral Finance and Financial Stability project at Harvard Business School. The project, launched in July 2016, focused on analysing and exploring stability within financial systems. Within it, Greenwood led research on liquidity management within banks, and the nature of modern bank runs. His work also linked growth within the financial sector to being a prelude to crisis;[23] the perspective noted 'that financial instability often follows periods when financial institutions, like investors and policy makers, have underestimated risks'.[24] Greenwood's later work in 'Predictable Financial Crises' concluded 'the combination of rapid credit growth and asset-price gains during the prior three years is associated with a 40 percent probability of entering a financial crisis within the next three years'.[25]
Retail investors
Greenwood's research has also focused on individual investors, as well as the rise of 'meme stocks' and impact of retail investors in buoying the American market in 2020–21 and research on the impact of COVID-19 on the economy.[26][27] His research noted that market speculation can flare with the combination of stimulus funds and retail investors.[28][29][30] Earlier work, alongside Nicholas Barberis and Andrei Shleifer linked bullishness to frequent extrapolation of results from recent returns, as well as observing the difficulty for individual investors in finding market-beating strategies.[31][32][33][34]
^Writer, Christina Pazzanese Harvard Staff (February 6, 2018). "Harvard Business School's Robin Greenwood discusses the stock market plunge". Harvard Gazette. Archived from the original on January 4, 2023. Retrieved January 4, 2023. The things I've worked on have been investor expectations, measurement of bubbles, and things like that. We did some work on trying to predict the end of bubbles.
^"Energy stocks are in a bubble — and here's when they're likely to crash". MSN. Archived from the original on January 4, 2023. Retrieved January 4, 2023. The researchers found that the probability of a market sector crashing — defined as a drop of at least 40% over the subsequent two years — was correlated with its trailing two-year performance relative to the overall market.
^Hulbert, Mark (February 26, 2021). "Bitcoin's role in retirement portfolios". MarketWatch. Archived from the original on January 4, 2023. Retrieved January 4, 2023. In making this prediction I am following the lead of an academic study entitled "Bubbles for Fama," which appeared several years ago in the Journal of Financial Economics. Its authors were Robin Greenwood, a finance and banking professor at Harvard Business School and chair of its Behavioral Finance and Financial Stability project
^Shaw, Jonathan (December 7, 2020). "Can Financial Crises Be Predicted?". Harvard Magazine. Archived from the original on January 4, 2023. Retrieved January 4, 2023. That's an enormous number," notes Gund professor of finance and banking Robin Greenwood. And that risk compares to just a 7 percent probability in normal times. The association just "jumps out at you. You don't have to do any fancy analysis to uncover it," adds Greenwood, who is coauthor of the Harvard Business School (HBS) working paper, "Predictable Financial Crises,
^Hernandez Barcena, Lorena; Milstein, Eric; Wessel, David (March 17, 2022). "Hutchins Roundup: Tuition increases, stimulus checks, and more". Hutchins Roundup. Archived from the original on January 4, 2023. Retrieved January 5, 2023. The federal Economic Impact Payments distributed during the pandemic were followed by increases in retail trading and the share prices of retail-dominated portfolios, find Robin Greenwood of Harvard Business School and Toomas Laarits and Jeffrey Wurgler of NYU Stern.
^Plender, John (July 28, 2015). Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets. Biteback Publishing. ISBN978-1-84954-957-8. Archived from the original on March 8, 2023. Retrieved January 30, 2023. Yet there is now academic evidence from Robin Greenwood and Andrei Shleifer at Harvard University that when markets are close to their peak, investors are most bullish because they tend to extrapolate recent rises in prices into the ...
^Hulbert, Mark (December 17, 2022). "This can't-miss stock trading strategy has disappeared – and isn't coming back". MarketWatch. Archived from the original on January 4, 2023. Retrieved January 4, 2023. The takeaway, Greenwood told me, is that market-beating strategies don't last forever. Because the index effect used to be large and predictable, it was inevitable that Wall Street would eventually discover it and, in the process, kill the goose laying the golden egg. He and his-co-author write: "The decline of the index effect is much like the evidence for other anomalies [patterns that can be profitably exploited], that they decline once they are well recognized by the market."
