Robert Shiller

Why organisations work with Robert Shiller

• He provides Nobel-level empirical authority on asset bubbles, housing cycles, and equity valuation, the questions a board faces when deciding whether to commit capital at the top of a cycle.
• He named the bubbles others missed. Irrational Exuberance warned of the dot-com peak in 2000 and the housing peak before the subprime crisis, both calls now in the public record.
• He gives leaders the indicators they can actually use, including the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices and the CAPE ratio, both of which sit inside the standard toolkit of professional investors.
• His work on Narrative Economics gives boards a structured way to think about how stories move markets and consumer behaviour, which matters when sentiment shifts faster than fundamentals.
• He is one of the few macroeconomists who built behavioural finance into the mainstream, co-authoring Animal Spirits and Phishing for Phools with George Akerlof.

Biography highlights

• Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University and Fellow of the International Center for Finance at Yale School of Management.
• 2013 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, shared with Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen.
• Co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices and the Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings ratio (CAPE / Shiller PE).
• Author of Irrational Exuberance, Narrative Economics, Animal Spirits, Phishing for Phools, Finance and the Good Society, and The New Financial Order.
• Regular Project Syndicate columnist and former New York Times “Economic View” columnist.
• Narrative Economics named a Financial Times Best Book of 2019.

Biography

Asset prices have a habit of detaching from fundamentals long before anyone calls it a bubble. The challenge for boards and investors is recognising the moment, separating durable conviction from collective story, and acting on it. That problem has defined Robert Shiller’s working life as an empirical economist.

Shiller is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale and a Fellow at the Yale School of Management International Center for Finance. The 2013 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen, recognised his empirical analysis of asset prices, including the work showing that stock prices move far more than dividends justify. The implication for capital markets has shaped a generation of valuation thinking.

His infrastructure sits inside the toolkit of serious investors. The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, developed with Karl Case, became the reference series for US housing and the basis for CME futures. The Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings ratio, built with John Campbell, gave equity investors a long-cycle valuation lens. Irrational Exuberance, first published in 2000, named the dot-com peak in real time and was updated to identify the housing bubble before the subprime crisis.

The later work moved into territory most macroeconomists avoid. Animal Spirits and Phishing for Phools, both with George Akerlof, brought behavioural and psychological forces into mainstream macro. Narrative Economics, a Financial Times Best Book of 2019, made the case that the stories people tell each other about money and markets shape outcomes as much as the numbers do. For senior leaders, that is the practical question: which narratives are moving capital right now, and which ones are about to break.

Key speaking topics

• Asset prices and market valuation
• Housing markets and price cycles
• Behavioural finance
• Narrative economics
• Bubbles and financial volatility
• Macroeconomic risk and forecasting
• Innovation in finance and risk management

Ideal for

• Boards and investment committees making capital allocation decisions under cycle and valuation uncertainty
• CFOs, CIOs, and treasury leaders in banks, asset managers, and insurers
• Senior policymakers, central bank audiences, and regulators working on financial stability
• Real estate, mortgage, and housing finance leadership

Audience outcomes

• A clearer read on where current asset prices sit relative to long-cycle valuation benchmarks like CAPE
• A working understanding of how narrative and sentiment translate into measurable market behaviour
• A sharper framework for spotting bubble dynamics before they reverse
• Behavioural finance applied to specific decisions on housing, equities, and credit
• Direct exposure to the empirical evidence behind Nobel-recognised work on asset pricing