Biography

Giorgia Piacentino is an associate professor in the Finance Division at Columbia Business School. She received her PhD from the London School of Economics in 2013 and holds an MSc from the Toulouse School of Economics. Before joining Columbia, she was an assistant professor at Washington University in St Louis.

She does research on corporate finance theory, focusing on banking, law and economics, financial contracting, and corporate governance.  For example, in two recent papers on banking, she explores how banks create private money, something tied to the very origins of banking but omitted from existing models.  Despite its historical roots, this perspective speaks to contemporary regulatory proposals such as capital and liquidity requirements.  

In her work on corporate governance, Giorgia goes beyond the classic conflict of interest between shareholders and managers, and finds surprising results.  In one paper, she finds that intuitional investors can undermine market discipline; in another paper, she finds that board diversity can lead to bad decisions, or, worse, no decision whatever.