Fire the Behavioral Econs! (not really,but...)

A lot has been said on how cool, interesting, realistic etc., behavioral finance and economics are. Behavioral Finance/Econ professors are valuable stock that the finance industry would love to possess…

I was thinking that if you have some of these guys as staff, you could maybe ask them for their opinion on how to manage your university’s endowment (Havard’s 36,9 billion and Yale’s 27 billion in 2008 was a lot of money…). This would be especially valuable before and during the crisis that was "foretold" by some of them.

So here is the “shocking graph” indicating the number of Behavioral Econ/Finance courses (you could have graphed # of professors, no change) taught at an Ivy School on the X-axis, and annual 2008/2009 endowment return on the Y axis…

The more Behavioral econs you have, the more you lose*... Firing them could be a solution :-), but that's not what I want to talk about. My point is that, these academics are giving talks to banks, mutual funds, and especially policy makers, but how can we expect anyone to really listen to them when their own institutions don't? I often have the impression that when it comes to the economy, economic policy, you name it..., economists are the last ones to be asked for an opinion...

*don’t take it literally