Bio

Dr. Niessner is an Associate Professor of Finance and the Arthur M. Weimer Faculty Fellow at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. Before joining Kelley, she was the Judith C. and William G. Bollinger Visiting Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, a Vice President on the Global Stock Selection team at AQR Capital Management, and an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management. Dr. Niessner holds a B.A. in Economics and Statistics and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Dr. Niessner studies how investors form beliefs and trade in an information environment shaped by artificial intelligence, social media, and the financial press. Her most recent work brings AI into finance and labor economics, extracting personality traits from facial images to predict career outcomes and using large language model agents to elicit investor beliefs about news. A second strand uses investor social networks to measure disagreement and attention at daily frequency, showing how they drive trading volume, help managers make corporate decisions, and respond to fake news. A third strand examines retail investors and new asset classes, from initial coin offerings to cryptocurrency trading and celebrity endorsements.

Her research has appeared in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Accounting Research, and Management Science. Two of her papers were selected as Editor’s Choice, and her study of initial coin offerings was the lead article in the Review of Financial Studies. Her work has been covered by The Economist, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Niessner served as an Associate Editor of the Annual Review of FinTech, and she has taught behavioral finance, FinTech, and cryptocurrencies to undergraduate, MBA, and executive MBA students at Kelley, Wharton, and Yale.

A downloadable CV (PDF) is available, and a full list of papers is on the research page.