Prof. Vesa Pursiainen

Vesa Pursiainen is Associate Professor of Finance at the University of St.Gallen. Before pursuing his academic career, Professor Pursiainen worked as an investment banker at J.P. Morgan and as an investment professional at Oaktree Capital Management.

Professor Pursiainen combines behavioral and cultural insights with novel data to study financial markets. In recent work, he shows that entrepreneurs' negative attitudes towards debt—debt aversion—affects the financing decisions of the businesses they run. Debt-averse entrepreneurs are less likely to use debt. They also show less interest in COVID-19 support policies if they perceive them to involve debt, based on experiments randomizing the framing and labeling of otherwise nearly identical, hypothetical COVID-19 support policies as debt or grants. In another stream of his work, he studies the role of technology in finance and shows that banks with better IT capabilities were better able to shift customers from physical branches to digital banking services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further analysis shows that banks with better IT also originated more SME loans, attracted more deposits, and received better mobile customer reviews.

• Financial Markets
  • International Financial Markets and Emerging Markets
• Portfolio Management and Asset Classes
  • Behavioral Finance and Neurofinance
• Financial Institutions
  • Banks
  • Institutional Investors and Funds
  • Venture Capital and Private Equity
• Corporate Finance and Governance
  • Corporate Governance and Managerial Compensation
  • Financial Valuation
  • Financing Policy and Capital Structure
  • Mergers and Acquisitions
• Frontier Topics
  • Big Data and Fintech
  • Sustainable Finance