Antoinette Schoar is a German-American economist, currently the Stewart C. Myers-Horn Family Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Education and Career
Schoar received her Diploma in Economics from University of Cologne in 1995 and received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2000, advised by Sherwin Rosen. She joined MIT as an assistant professor in finance in 2000 and became a full professor in 2008. She has served on the inaugural advisory board of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Aside from her academic career and her time at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Schoar is also a co-founder of ideas42. Ideas42 is a non-profit that uses research done in behavioral economics and psychology in order to solve various social problems. Through ideas42, Schoar is able to combine her expertise in entrepreneurship and academia.
Research
Together with Marianne Bertrand, Antoinette Schoar has investigated the effect of managers on firm policies in the U.S., finding that a large share of differences between firms' investment, financial, and organizational practices are due to differences in their managers and, more importantly, their management style, with older managers generally being more conservative and managers with MBA degrees being generally more aggressive in terms of corporate decisions. In work with Bertrand and David Thesmar, Schoar observes that after the deregulation of banking in France in 1985, banks became less willing to bail out firms with poor performance and firms being more dependent on banks became more likely to restructure, with rising rates of job and asset reallocation, higher allocative efficiency, and a less concentrated banking sector, an observation in line with Schumpeterian processes of creative destruction. Schoar and Bertrand have also conducted research on the role of family for family enterprises, finding that family values tend to be associated with lower economic development - though differently than trust - and more family firms, are fairly stable over time, don't react much to economic changes, and don't appear to reflect weak formal institutions. In further research on this topic in Thailand with Simon Johnson and Krislert Samphantharak, Schoar and Bertrand find family involvement in the ownership of family businesses to increase in family size, though firm performance decreases the more the founders' sons become involved, possibly because of a "race to the bottom" wherein, fearing the dilution of ownership and control over the business group, the descendants attempt to tunnel resources out of the group's firms.
Selected publications
Kaplan, S.N., Schoar, A.. Private equity performance: Returns, persistence, and capital flows. Journal of Finance, 60, pp. 1791–1823.
Schoar, A.. Effects of corporate diversification on productivity. Journal of Finance, 57, pp. 2379–2403.
Lerner, J., Schoar, A.. Does legal enforcement affect financial transactions? The contractual channel in private equity. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120, pp. 223–246.
Lerner, J., Schoar, A., Wongsunwai, A.. Smart institutions, foolish choices: The limited partner performance puzzle. Journal of Finance, 62, pp. 731–764.
Afonso, G., Kovner, A., Schoar, A.. Stressed, not frozen: The federal funds market in the financial crisis. Journal of Finance, 66, pp. 1109–1139.
Drexler, A., Fischer, G., Schoar, A.. Keeping it simple: Financial literacy and rules of thumb. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 6, pp. 1–31.
Lerner, J., Schoar, A.. The illiquidity puzzle: Theory and evidence from private equity. Journal of Financial Economics, 72, pp. 3–40.
Iyer, R. et al.. Interbank liquidity crunch and the firm credit crunch: Evidence from the 2007-2009 crisis. Review of Financial Studies, 27, pp. 347–372.
Adelino, M., Schoar, A., Severino, F.. House prices, collateral, and self-employment. Journal of Financial Economics, 117, pp. 288–306.
Kerr, W.R., Lerner, J., Schoar, A.. The consequences of entrepreneurial finance: Evidence from angel financings. Review of Financial Studies, 27, pp. 20-55.
Schoar, A.. The divide between subsistence and transformational entrepreneurship. Innovation Policy and the Economy, 10, pp. 57-81.
De Mel, S., McKenzie, D., Woodruff, C.. Who are microenterprise owners? Evidence from Sri Lanka on Tokman versus De Soto. International Differences in Entrepreneurship, pp. 63-87.
Bruhn, M., Karlan, D., Schoar, A.. What capital is missing in developing countries? American Economic Review, 100, pp. 629-633.
Schoar, A., Zuo, L.. Shaped by booms and busts: How the economy impacts CEO careers and management styles. Review of Financial Studies'', 30, pp. 1425–1456.
