Authors

Samuel Hanson

Professor of Business Administration

Harvard Business School

SAMUEL G. HANSON is a Professor in the Finance Unit at Harvard Business School, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He teaches the Investment Strategies course in the MBA elective curriculum and PhD courses in Corporate Finance and Empirical Methods.
Professor Hanson holds a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in Quantitative Economics and Philosophy from Tufts University. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he worked as an investment banking analyst at Lehman Brothers and as an assistant economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. During 2009 Hanson worked at the U.S. Treasury Department where he served as a Special Assistant and Liaison to the White House National Economic Council.
Professor Hanson’s research interests lie in corporate finance, behavioral finance, and asset pricing. His recent research has focused on corporate supply responses to fluctuations in investor demand for different types of securities and on optimal financial regulation. Hanson’s research has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Publications

Business Continuity Insurance in the Next Disaster

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an economic shock unparalleled in severity and breadth across the US economy since at least the Great Depression. The spring of 2020 saw unprecedented business closures and revenue declines. The government response was swift and unprecedented in scale. The federal government deployed two novel programs to support small businesses: Paycheck Protection ...