Werner De Bondt

Werner F.M. De Bondt is one of the founders in the field of behavioral finance. He is also the founding director of Richard H. Driehaus Center for Behavioral Finance at DePaul University in Chicago. Previously, he was the Frank Graner Professor of Investment Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He is a native of Belgium and an alumnus of Hagelstein (St.-Katelijne-Waver). He received a degree as Handelsingenieur from Universitaire Faculteiten Sint-Ignatius Antwerpen (Antwerp, Belgium). He subsequently earned an M.B.A. from the Catholic University of Louvain (Louvain, Belgium), a master's degree in Public Administration from Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from Cornell University.

Alongside Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Hersh Shefrin, Meir Statman, Robert Shiller and Richard Thaler (with whom he co-wrote the seminal paper “Does the Stock Market Overreact? ” in 1985) De Bondt helped define the field of behavioral (or psychological) finance long before it became popular. He has investigated key research questions such as the intuitive tendency of naïve investors to extrapolate past trends in stock prices and corporate earnings, market overreaction, bubbles, the excessive self-confidence of traders, and their herding instinct. His work has been published in numerous academic journals (including the Journal of Finance, the Financial Analysts Journal, the European Economic Review, and the American Economic Review) and De Bondt has been cited in many European and U.S. news publications, including the Chicago Tribune, Finanz und Wirtschaft, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, De Standaard, Trends, BNQ Perspectives on banking, Elliott Wave International, LESSAC, De Tijd, the Wall Street Journal and others.

Professor De Bondt has been a guest on various TV programs including PBSand Kanaal Z with Veronique Goossens. He speaks at many conferences organized by universities and government agencies. He has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including the Journal of Behavioral Finance, the Financial Analysts Journal, the British Accounting Review, the Journal of Empirical Finance, and Behavioral Science & Policy.