Prof. Devin Shanthikumar is the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs at the University of California Irvine and Professor in Accounting. Prior to joining UC Irvine, she was a Professor at the Harvard Business School. She has won numerous teaching awards, and was listed on Poet & Quants Top 40 Under 40 Business School Professors list in 2019.
Shanthikumar’s research sits at the nexus of psychology, financial markets, and technology. She examines the effects of behavioral biases, incentives, and social psychology on market participants such as investors, analysts, and regulators, and the effects of these biases and incentives on markets and firms. For example, Shanthikumar has examined how sell-side analysts “speak in two tongues” to individual versus institutional investors, who differ in their understanding of analyst incentive conflicts; the role that “local bias” plays in investors’ Google search behavior, and the effects this local bias has on the stock market around earnings announcements; and the effect of CEO risk-taking incentives on product innovation. Her latest work focuses on the effects of social media interaction on sentiment extremeness, effects of AI on analysts and financial forecasts, as well as emerging issues in the ESG space. Her research has been published in top journals, including Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, The Accounting Review, and Management Science, and has been cited in publications such as The Economist, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Shanthikumar earned her PhD in Business Administration with a focus in Finance from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, her BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a certificate from Harvard Business School’s executive education program, the General Manager Program.