[6] He was born to a Jewish family[7] in the Soviet Union and emigrated to Rochester, New York, as a teenager in 1976, where he attended an inner-city school and learned English from episodes of Charlie's Angels.

As a freshman at Harvard, Shleifer took Math 55 with Brad DeLong; he has said that the course made him realize he was not destined to be a mathematician, but the experience gave him a future co-author.

[13] The article notes that investors who bet against a major overvaluation or undervaluation are exposing themselves to substantial risks if there is uncertainty about how long it will take for the misvaluation to be corrected.

In Roger Lowenstein's 2000 book, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, the author credits Shleifer and Vishny with describing the problem that led to LTCM's 1998 collapse.

With coauthors Robert W. Vishny, Rafael La Porta, Simeon Djankov and Florencio Lopez de Silanes, Shleifer has also made significant contributions to the study of corporate governance.

In particular, Shleifer and Vishny's 1997 article A Survey of Corporate Governance[14] focused on the big differences across countries in the use of bank debt versus equity financing.

An alternative explanation that they examined is that companies pay dividends in order to develop a reputation for returning cash to shareholders, so that they can issue more equity in the future.

The Clark medal citation described him as a "superb economist, working in the old Chicago tradition of building simple models, emphasizing basic economic mechanisms, and carefully looking at the evidence.... A recurring theme of his research is the respective role of markets, institutions, and governments.

Among other things, the Institute for a Law Based Economy (ILBE) was allegedly used to assist Shleifer's wife, Nancy Zimmerman, who operated a hedge fund that speculated in Russian bonds.