Antoinette Schoar

Jonathan Parker (Robert C. Merton (1970) Professor of Financial Economics and Professor of Finance) and Antoinette Schoar (Stewart C. Myers-Horn Family Professor of Finance) have won the 2024 TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security from the TIAA Institute.

Their winning paper, co-authored with Yang Sun (Brandeis University), is titled “Retail Financial Innovation and Stock Market Dynamics: The Case of Target Date Funds” (The Journal of Finance, Vol. 78, No. 5, October 2023). The paper shows that Target Date Fund (TDF) trading activity (with a strategy to sell stocks when the market does well and buy when it does poorly) helps stabilize stock prices and may dampen overall market volatility. “While earlier research has focused on benefits [of Target Date Fund (TDF) holdings within retirement plans] to individual investors, the authors advance the literature by analyzing TDFs’ effects on asset markets. The results are relevant for academics, practitioners and policymakers alike” (Jonathan Reuter, Boston College—an award judge).

The award was announced and presented earlier in January 2025 at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) in San Francisco.

Antoinette Schoar has been appointed as co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Corporate Finance program. The NBER is a nonprofit economic research organization, dedicated to conducting research on a wide variety of issues confronting society, as well as disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals. With more than 1,400 scholars who are professors of economics and business at colleges and universities in North America, the NBER is a private and nonpartisan organization supported by research grants from government agencies and private foundations, by investment income, and by individual and corporate contributions. Twenty-seven Nobel Prize winners in Economics and 13 past chairs of the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisers have held NBER affiliations.  

Schoar was appointed for her “wide-ranging” research that “spans many issues, including venture capital, entrepreneurship, household finance, and financial intermediation.” She has been a member of the NBER CF program since 2001 and also directs the NBER Working Group on Entrepreneurship.

Schoar is co-leading the NBER Corporate Finance program with Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Their term began in January.

Antoinette Schoar has received the Ewing Marion Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship. This award was established by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in 2005 to inspire promising young scholars to contribute new insight to entrepreneurship. The honor, which includes a cash prize, is awarded every two years to one scholar younger than 40 "whose research has made a significant contribution to the literature in entrepreneurship."