David S. Scharfstein

David S. Scharfstein is the Edmund Cogswell Converse Professor of Finance and Banking at Harvard Business School. His research focuses on banking, financial distress, risk management, housing finance, venture capital and corporate investment. He teaches the introductory finance course in the MBA program and the Ph.D. corporate finance course. Previously, he has taught courses on private equity and venture capital.

Prior to joining the Harvard Business School faculty in 2003, Scharfstein was for 16 years on the finance faculty of MIT's Sloan School of Management, most recently as the Dai Ichi Kangyo Professor of Management. He has been Editor of the Rand Journal of Economics, Associate Editor of the Journal of Finance and Review of Financial Studies, and Director of the American Finance Association. He has received fellowships from the Sloan Foundation, Batterymarch Financial Management, and the Olin Foundation, as well as a Fulbright Scholarship at Oxford University.

Scharfstein is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a member of the Squam Lake Working Group on Financial Regulation, a nonpartisan, nonaffiliated group of fifteen leading economists which offers guidance on financial regulatory reform and recently published The Squam Lake Report: Fixing the Financial System (Princeton University Press). During 2009-10 Scharfstein served as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

Scharfstein has a Ph.D in Economics from MIT (1986) and an A.B. summa cum laude from Princeton University (1982).