ICF Welcomes New Finance Faculty

The Yale School of Management has announced new faculty appointments effective July 1. ICF welcomes two new finance faculty members.

Alp Simsek, the Rudi Dornbusch Career Development Associate Professor at MIT, who has visited at Yale for the last year, will join the faculty as a professor of finance, and Paul Fontanier, who received a PhD from Harvard University, is a new assistant professor of finance at Yale SOM.

Alp Simsek’s academic interests are centered in macroeconomics and finance, and extend into international and behavioral finance. His research focuses on the connections between financial markets and the macroeconomy, with an emphasis on understanding the fluctuations driven by beliefs and speculation. He has published extensively in top economics and finance journals, and his work has been featured in news outlets such as Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. He has been awarded several prizes in research and teaching, including the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Brattle Prize for the distinguished paper in corporate finance, the Western Financial Association NASDAQ award for the best paper in asset pricing, and the best undergraduate and graduate teacher awards at the MIT economics department.

Before joining Yale, Alp Simsek was an Associate Professor of Economics at MIT, and previously, an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is also a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and at the Center for Economic Policy and Research. Simsek earned bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science from MIT in 2004, a masters of engineering degree from MIT in 2005, and a PhD in economics from MIT in 2010.

Paul Fontanier is an applied theorist with interests at the intersection of Finance, Macroeconomics, and Behavioral Economics. In his most recent research, he analyzes how policymakers should adapt their macroprudential and monetary policies when the financial sector is vulnerable to belief-driven boom-bust cycles. He was awarded the AQR Top Finance Graduate Award in 2022.

He grew up in France where he attended the École Polytechnique and the Corps des Mines. He was awarded his PhD by Harvard University in 2022.