Brad Barber
Gallagher Professor of Finance, Graduate School of Management, University of California Davis
Gallagher Professor of Finance, Graduate School of Management, University of California Davis
Brad Barber is the Gallagher Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Management, UC Davis.
Professor Barber has been recognized as one of the fifty most-cited financial economists in the world (ranking 38th in one citation survey). See Professor Barber’s Google Scholar page for links to his research. Professor Barber is the President of the Financial Management Association. He was Principal Investigator for the CalPERS Sustainable Research Initiative (SIRI), founder of the annual Napa Conference on Financial Markets Research, and the finance department editor for Management Science from 2009-2012.
Professor Barber’s current research focuses on asset pricing, behavioral finance, and gender. He has written numerous scholarly articles, which have appeared in top academic publications including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Sociological Review, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and the Financial Analyst Journal. His research has been covered extensively in the financial press, including Business Week, Time, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, NBC Nightly News, CNN, CNNfn, and CNBC.
Professor Barber received his Ph.D. in finance from the University of Chicago in 1991. He also received an MBA from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in Economics from the University of Illinois.
We show parental careers differentially affect the future career choices of girls and boys using survey data from CFA Institute members. Among CFA Institute members, women are more likely to have a STEM parent (particularly a STEM mother) than men. Relative to the base rates at which girls and boys become CFA Institute members, STEM mothers increase the girls’ rate by 48% more than the boys’ rate; STEM fathers increase the girls’ rate 29% more than the boys’ rate. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that early role models, particularly female role models, influence women’s choice of finance careers.
We show the math gender gap is related to women’s career outcomes using international geographic data on the investment profession, a math-intensive and 80% male profession. The math gender gap predicts the percentage of women investment professionals across countries and across states. Female labor force participation, gender inequality measures, and competition attitudes do not diminish the economic significance of the math gender gap as a predictor of women’s career outcomes. Our results suggest other societal factors exist that either directly affect the math training of women or jointly affect the math gender gap and women’s career outcomes.