Growing up in Landshut, Germany, Brunnermeier was expected to follow his father into the business of carpentry. A slump in the construction industry lead Brunnermeier onto a different path. He worked for the German tax office in Landshut and Munich and served in the German Army before enrolling as an undergraduate student at the University of Regensburg in 1991. He continued his studies at Vanderbilt University, receiving a master's degree in Economics in 1994. Subsequently, he joined the European Doctoral Program first at the Bonn Graduate School of Economics and from 1995 to 1999 at the London School of Economics. He was awarded his Ph.D. by the London School of Economics in 1999. While at the London School of Economics, Brunnermeier parleyed a survey paper into a book on asset prices, bubbles, herding and crashes. He was subsequently hired by Princeton University as an assistant professor in 1999. He became full professor in 2006 and assumed his current chaired professorship as Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics in 2008. In 2011, he set up the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. In 2014, he became director of Princeton's Bendheim Center for Finance.
Selected awards, memberships, and editorial services
Brunnermeier's research lies at the intersection of international macro, monetary and financial economics. He primarily studies distortions caused by financial frictions. These frictions invalidate the Efficient market hypothesis, a proposition that markets incorporate all information relevant to prices immediately and consequently the price of a given asset accurately represents the likely value of that asset.
Price efficiency, bubbles, liquidity, and systemic risk
Faced with the empirical evidence that asset prices diverged from their fundamentals during the dot-com bubble, Brunnermeier crafted a model of trading where participants in the market would recognize bubbles in asset prices but continue to trade "into the wind". Brunnermeier's empirical paper, coauthored with Stefan Nagel, documents that hedge funds were riding the dot-com bubble. The paper won the Smith Breeden Prize in 2004. Brunnermeier and Lasse Pedersen introduced different liquidity concepts and studied liquidity spirals, which are vicious cycles that amplify initial shocks and provide an explanation for the liquidity crisis in 2008. Brunnermeier with Tobias Adrian from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York created one of the first systemic risk measures, the CoVaR, an alternative to value at risk which takes spillover and contagion effects between assets and industries into account.
Macroeconomy and finance
Brunnermeier and Yuliy Sannikov integrated financial frictions into macro and international economic models. Their macro models capture non-linearities that occur during crises episodes. They also introduced the concept of volatility paradox, which refers to the phenomenon that risk builds up primarily during tranquil times in background in the form of imbalances and only materializes when crises erupt.
Brunnermeier and Sannikov's monetary paper, The I Theory of Money, studies debt deflation à la Fisher and the interaction between monetary policy and macroprudential policy. The "Paradox of Prudence" emerges: micro-prudent behavior of individual financial institutions is not necessarily macro-prudent. His approach provides an alternative to the predominant New-Keynesian view, in which price and wage rigidities are the primary frictions.
International financial markets
Brunnermeier's work on international finance documents the link between carry trades and currency crashes. He also analyzes sudden stops in international credit flows and other inefficiencies due to pecuniary externalities.
Euro and economic philosophies
Further work of Brunnermeier focuses on the architecture of the euro and the Eurozone. His book, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas,, from the Banque de France and International Monetary Fund, shows, how core problems of the euro are also linked to conflicting political and economic philosophies of the Eurozone's founding countries, especially those of Germany and France, and discusses ways to reconcile the competing views. Brunnermeier also proposes European Safe Bonds in form of Sovereign Bond Backed Securities as a means to break the vicious circle between sovereign risk and bank risk in the Eurozone and to rechannel flight-to-safety capital flows from cross-border flows to flows across tranches of the ESBies.
