Markus Brunnermeier

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.

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.

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.

Brunnermeier received several career awards. In 1999, he was selected for the Review of Economic Studies Tour. He was named a Sloan Fellow in 2005, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2010. In 2008 he was awarded the Germán Bernácer Prize, which is granted to a European economists under 40. In 2016, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) appointed him as the Lamfalussy Senior Research Fellow.

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 (LSE) in 1999.

Markus Konrad Brunnermeier (born March 22, 1969) is an economist, who is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He is a faculty member of Princeton's Department of Economics and director of the Bendheim Center for Finance. His research focuses on international financial markets and the macro economy with special emphasis on bubbles, liquidity, financial crises and monetary policy. He promoted the concepts of liquidity spirals, CoVaR as co-risk measure, the paradox of prudence, and the I Theory of Money. He is or was a member of several advisory groups, including to the IMF, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the European Systemic Risk Board, the German Bundesbank and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office.