ProfessorJoakim Westerholm

Joakim Westerholm’s research interests are broad and span several sub-fields in financial economics. In Asset Pricing, his research investigates the pricing impact of trading by insiders, aggregated retail investors, and institutional investors. His work showing that insider trades can be better understood through the trading decisions of underage accounts, brokers, and directors has gained traction in journals of the highest standing. In Market Microstructure, Joakim specializes in optimal market design and trading strategies for executing large orders. His ARC Discovery Grant work comparing the exchange architectures of world exchanges gained widespread attention early in his career. Joakim’s current work in market microstructure on High-Frequency Trading and on theory-based optimal strategies for Order Splitting has the potential to be groundbreaking. In Behavioral Finance, Joakim’s research focuses on investor behavior during stressful life events, such as divorce. Joakim is also working on anomalies that are currently unexplained in the literature, such as anchoring to a reference price, momentum effects, and the importance of the highest price a security has traded at over the last 52 weeks. Finally, in Corporate Finance, Joakim has recently published research in leading journals on the impact of the CEO's personal attributes on their decisions for the firm. Using knowledge of CEOs' personal investment strategies to identify their personal attributes, his research investigates the impact of CEO preferences on their decisions to acquire other companies, invest in research and development, and expand the firm through leverage. Currently, he is passionate about implementing large language models and agentic AI coding tools in research in finance, which opens up huge opportunities for analyzing large, unstructured data.