The intensive PhD summer course in behavioral finance brought students from the U.S., Europe, and Asia to Yale SOM from June 8 to 12.
Nearly 50 students from 25 universities gathered at Evans Hall in June for the 2026 Yale Summer School in Behavioral Finance.
The weeklong program is an intensive PhD course in behavioral finance, taught by SOM faculty members who are leading practitioners in the field. Held every two years, the program draws graduate students in finance and economics.
“Behavioral finance tries to make sense of financial markets and investor behavior by way of a deeper understanding of human psychology and, in particular, by acknowledging that humans sometimes think and behave in irrational ways,” said founder and organizer Nicholas Barberis, the Stephen and Camille Schramm Professor of Finance. “It is a vibrant field, one that is increasingly seen as central for understanding important facts about the financial world.”
The summer school reflects SOM’s longstanding leadership in behavioral finance, beginning with the pioneering research of Robert Shiller, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics. Earlier this year, the International Center for Finance hosted the 18th Behavioral Economics Annual Meeting, a leading behavioral economics conference co-founded by Barberis.
Barberis teaches the program’s core lectures. Other sessions covering specific topics in greater depth were led this year by his Yale SOM colleagues James Choi and Kelly Shue and five faculty members from other universities. Karen Spitzer, assistant director of SOM’s International Center for Finance, coordinated the program’s logistics.
This year’s curriculum included new material on artificial intelligence. “It is inevitable that AI will become a significant part of behavioral finance research, and these sessions gave students a sense of the kinds of research that might be possible,” Barberis said.
In one session, Shue, the Amman Mineral Professor of Finance, discussed her research using AI photo analysis to study how personality traits are associated with career outcomes. In another, Suproteem Sarkar, assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, showed students how AI can be used to translate news articles into mathematical representations, which can help researchers understand how companies are perceived.
For attendee Bam Charoenwong, a finance PhD student at the Wharton School, the summer school offered a unique opportunity to study behavioral finance in a focused setting.
“My own work is in financial intermediation, where traditional rational frameworks are very useful,” she said. “But the summer school helped me think more seriously about settings where behavioral forces such as different preferences and beliefs may help explain what we see in the data.”
Attendee Clara Torslov, a PhD student at Copenhagen Business School who is visiting Harvard University, said the program’s interdisciplinary approach broadened how she thinks about her own field.
“You get to challenge your current knowledge or get inspired to apply the insights in a new way in your own field,” said Torslov, whose research focuses on household finance. “At the end of the day, we are all just humans making decisions.”
Both students noted that the summer school’s structure—which included pre-arranged small-group dinners—helped them build connections with peers. “This was one of my favorite parts of the program,” Charoenwong said. “I left with a much better sense of the broader community, and with several people I hope to stay in touch with.”
For much of its history, the Yale Summer School in Behavioral Finance has been generously supported by the Lynne and Andrew Redleaf Foundation.
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