Vesa Pursiainen
SFI Faculty Member, Assistant Professor of Finance, University of St.Gallen
Vesa Pursiainen is Assistant 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.
Expertise
Professor Pursiainen combines behavioral and cultural insights with novel data to study financial markets. In recent work, he merges US data on financial market returns and domestic violence to revisit the classical prospect theory, showing that large stock market losses during the week cause significant increases in domestic violence during the weekend, while large gains have little to no impact. 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.
Expertise Fields
- 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
- Mergers and Acquisitions
- Frontier Topics
- Big Data and Fintech
- Sustainable Finance