Nils H. Hakansson is the Sylvan C. Coleman Professor of Finance and Accounting, Emeritus, at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. He is a former member of the faculty at UCLA as well as at Yale University. At Berkeley, he served as Director of the Professional Accounting Program (1985-1988) and as Director of the Berkeley Program in Finance (1988-1991). Professor Hakansson is a Certified Public Accountant and spent three years with Arthur Young & Company. He received his B.S. from the University of Oregon in 1958, and his MBA (1960) and Ph.D. (1966) from UCLA. In 1984, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in economics from the Stockholm School of Economics.

Professor Hakansson has published numerous articles in academic journals and in professional volumes. Many of his papers address various aspects of investment theory and asset allocation procedures as well as topics in information economics, financial reporting, security innovation, and automated exchanges. He has twice been a Visiting Scholar at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and was, in 1975, the Hoover Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and, in 1982, the Chevron Fellow at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. In 1984, he was a Special Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics.

Professor Hakansson has served on the editorial boards of several professional journals and been a consultant to the RAND Corporation and a number of investment organizations. He is a past president of the Western Finance Association (1983-1984) and a past member of the Financial Economists Roundtable (1993-2003). He is listed in Who's Who in Economics, a Fellow of Accounting Researchers International Association, and a trustee of the Laudus-Rosenberg Mutual Funds.