Prof. Julian Kölbel
SFI-Fakultätsmitglied, Assistant Professor in Sustainable Finance, Universität St.Gallen
Julian Kölbel is Assistant Professor of Sustainable Finance at the University of St.Gallen. Professor Kölbel is also a research affiliate at MIT Sloan, where he is a co-founder of the Aggregate Confusion Project. In addition to his academic work, he serves on the investment committee of the Swiss pension fund Abendrot.
Expertise
Julian Kölbel studies how moral values, beliefs, and information frictions shape financial markets, investor behavior, and real economic outcomes. His research spans sustainable finance, asset pricing, and political economy, with a particular focus on how ethical preferences and beliefs about impact are reflected in prices, portfolios, and corporate incentives. He is widely known for highlighting the aggregate confusion of ESG ratings, showing that rating divergence primarily reflects differences in measurement rather than fundamentally different value judgments. Complementing this work, he uses lab and field experiments to study investor demand for sustainability and real-world impact. Methodologically, his research combines theory, experiments, large-scale data, and machine learning, with direct relevance for pension investors, asset managers, and policymakers concerned with long-term investment, climate risk, and the credibility of sustainable finance.
Expertise Fields
- Financial Markets
- Information and Market Efficiency
- Portfolio Management and Asset Classes
- Behavioral Finance and Neurofinance
- Fixed Income
- Financial Institutions
- Pension Funds
- Rating Agencies
- Corporate Finance and Governance
- Financial Risk and Risk Management
- Frontier Topics
- Machine Learning and Applications of AI
- Sustainable Finance