Thorsten Hens

Thorsten Hens (born December 19, 1961) is a German and Swiss economist and finance academic.

According to the Handelsblatt ranking, Hens is among the top 10 economics professors in the German-speaking area (Germany, Switzerland and Austria).

Hens is Swiss Finance Institute professor of financial economics and director of the Swiss Banking Institute at the University of Zürich, Switzerland as well as a Fellow of Centre for Economic Policy Research and an adjunct professor of finance at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen.

In researching how investors make their decisions, Hens draws on work in psychology and applies insights from biology in order to understand the dynamics of financial markets.

He was one of the pioneers of evolutionary finance and cultural finance, where he conducted the first large-scale international test on risk- and time attitudes (INTRA).