Portrait image for Tyler Muir

Tyler Muir

Associate Professor of Finance, Donnalisa ’86 and Bill Barnum Endowed Term Chair in Management
“Selling stocks in volatile times actually appears to be a good idea based on the data, even though conventional investment wisdom tells us it is better to ride out the storm.”
(310) 825-9072
Areas of Expertise:
  • Asset Pricing
  • Financial Intermediaries
  • Liquidity
About
 

Biography

Associate Professor of Finance Tyler Muir’s main research interests are at the intersection of asset pricing, financial intermediaries and financial crises. “I’m interested in the role financial institutions play in financial markets and how this may change over time as things like financial regulation change,” he says.

His recent work has focused on how the health of the financial sector affects variation in asset prices. Muir finds that an intermediary-based asset pricing model can help explain returns across assets previously considered anomalies. He has also examined the behavior of asset prices during financial crises using historical data over 150 years and 14 countries, and documented substantial declines in stock and bond prices, even relative to the declines in macroeconomic fundamentals.

Muir’s co-authored study on volatility received media attention for its findings that, contrary to conventional wisdom and practices, it pays to get out of the stock market in times of turbulence. “In these really volatile times, we find that investors’ future returns aren’t actually any higher than they are in normal times,”
Muir told CNBC. “Our standard notion that high risk is equated with higher reward doesn’t seem to be true.”

Muir received his Ph.D. in finance from the Kellogg School of Management and his B.A. in mathematics from UC Berkeley. He was awarded the 2015 Amundi Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize for research published in the Journal of Finance. He joined UCLA Anderson from the faculty of Yale School of Management.

He enjoys traveling and outdoor activities, including winter surfing off snow-covered beaches — which he expects he won’t find in Southern California.

Education

Ph.D. Finance, 2013, Northwestern University
B.A. Mathematics, 2008, University of California, Berkeley

Publications/Forthcoming

Volatility Expectations and Returns (with Lars Lochstoer). Journal of Finance, forthcoming.

Intermediaries and Asset Prices: Evidence from the U.S., U.K., and Japan, 1870-2016 (with Matt Baron). Review of Financial Studies, forthcoming.

When Selling Becomes Viral: Disruptions in Debt Markets in the COVID-19 Crisis and the Fed's Response (with Valentin Haddad and Alan Moreira) Slides . Review of Financial Studies, October 2021.

Do Intermediaries Matter for Aggregate Asset Prices? (with Valentin Haddad). Journal of Finance, December 2021. Video Presentation at the NBER Long-Term Asset Management

Mobile Collateral vs Immobile Collateral (with Gary Gorton and Toomas Laarits). Journal of Money Credit and Banking, forthcoming. Media Coverage: Bloomberg

Is Risk Mispriced in a Credit Boom? Prepared for the INET Private Debt Initiative.

Should Long-Term Investors Time Volatility? (with Alan Moreira). Journal of Financial Economics, March 2019 [Lead Article]

Volatility-Managed Portfolios (with Alan Moreira) [Internet Appendix]. Journal of Finance, August 2017. Video Presentation at the NBER Long-Term Asset Management. Media coverage: Financial Times (FT 2018), CNBC, USA Today

Financial Crises and Risk Premia. Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 2017

Aggregate External Financing and Savings Waves (with Andrea Eisfeldt). Journal of Monetary Economics, December 2016

Financial Intermediaries and the Cross-Section of Asset Returns (with Tobias Adrian and Erkko Etula) [Web Appendix]. Journal of Finance, December 2014. Winner of the 2015 Journal of Finance Amundi Smith Breeden Prize, Distinguished Paper. Data. Video Presentation at the Utah Winter Finance Conference. NBER discussion of He, Kelly, Manela (2017), related paper using different intermediary SDF

Working Papers

How Credit Cycles Across a Financial Crisis (with Arvind Krishnamurthy) R&R

The Cost of Capital of the Financial Sector (with Tobias Adrian and Evan Friedman)

Hedging Risk Factors (with Bernard Herskovic and Alan Moreira)

1930: First Modern Crisis (with Gary Gorton and Toomas Laarits)

 

Media

Tracy Alloway. June 1, 2016. “From One Collateral Shortage to the Next.” Bloomberg Markets.

Mark Hulbert. May 18, 2016. “Sell on the panic!” USA Today.

Alex Rosenberg. March 23, 2016. “When markets get scary, panicking is smart: Yale profs.” CNBC.

Brian Sullivan. March 21, 2016. “When volatility rises, is panicking wise?” CNBC Trading Nation.

John Authers. March 9, 2016. “Re-assessing the classic risk-return trade off.” Financial Times.