Johan Walden

Dr. Johan Walden is a financial economist and testifying expert on risk analysis and financial and insurance markets, with a particular focus on portfolio risk diversification and risk regulation. He has provided analysis and expert testimony on risk-based capital (RBC) ratios of insurance and reinsurance companies, the role of RBC ratios in reviews by industry regulators and credit rating agencies (CRA), and the effect of risk-based capital calculations and capital adequacy models on agency credit ratings. In addition, he has studied the effect of increased leverage on the risk associated with investment in a particular stock, providing expert testimony showing increased volatility from a corporate acquisition that significantly increased the company’s debt load and illustrating how this risk could have been substantially reduced through diversification. Dr. Walden is the Mitsubishi Bank Chair in International Business and Finance at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Dr. Walden has been teaching at Berkeley since 2005. He regularly teaches MBA, MFE, and executive education courses covering topics in finance, asset pricing, and financial engineering. He has also served as a visiting scholar at other top universities, including NYU’s Stern School of Business, UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, Oxford University and INSEAD.

Dr. Walden has published over 30 academic articles in peer reviewed journals on topics of risk, diversification, asset pricing, and applied mathematics. His research has been published in the top academic journals in his fields, including the Journal of Finance, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Risk and Insurance, Journal of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Banking and Finance. His research on heavily-tailed risks and portfolio diversification in economics, finance, and insurance was published as part of the Springer book series “Lecture Notes in Statistics.” Over the course of his academic career, Dr. Walden has received over 20 honors, awards, grants, and fellowships. He has presented his research at some of the world’s preeminent universities and finance conferences, including the American Finance Association and European Finance Association, among others. Dr. Walden has also served as a referee for many of the top academic journals in economics, finance, and insurance, including Econometrica, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Risk and Insurance.

Before entering academia, Dr. Walden worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company’s Stockholm office, where he focused on corporate strategy, particularly within the telecommunications and financial institutions industries. Dr. Walden’s recent consulting experience includes assisting government entities in assessing new programs and regulations. In 2009, he assisted The Congressional Oversight Panel in evaluating the Federal Reserve Board’s Supervisory Capital Assessment Program, which resulted in recognition from national media outlets such as Fox Business, CNBC, ABC News, MSNBC, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Walden and his Berkeley colleague Dwight Jaffee also authored a report to the Swedish Financial Markets Committee analyzing the effect of new regulations on the Swedish banking and insurance systems.

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