Kent Daniel

Kent Daniel is a finance professor at Columbia Business School who spent time as a researcher at Goldman Sachs before returning to academia. His most cited work (with Hirshleifer and Subrahmanyam) developed a model of investor overconfidence that generates momentum in the short run followed by reversals in the long run — consistent with empirical patterns in stock returns. The model shows that overconfident investors over-weight their private signals and under-react to public information, creating short-run momentum, but eventually the public information forces price corrections. Daniel has also contributed to research on factor investing, combining academic rigor with practical implementation insights from his industry experience. His work represents the productive intersection of behavioral theory and systematic investment research.