# Patrick Bolton

patrick bolton (born June 11, 1957, Dublin, Ireland) is the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School (2005-present) and a Visiting Professor of Finance at Imperial College London (2018-present). He is a past president of the American Finance Association (2015).Bolton specializes in contract theory and its relationship to corporate finance and industrial organization, in particular the allocation of control and decision rights to contracting parties. He is studying the ways in which institutional investors and financial markets assess and respond to risks from climate change, and how public policy influences corporate behaviour and the actions of institutions.Bolton has published a number of books, including Contract Theory (2004) with Mathias Dewatripont, Credit Markets for the Poor (2005) with Howard Rosenthal, The Economics of Contracts (2008), Sovereign Wealth Funds and Long-term Investing (2012) with Frederic Samama and Joseph E. Stiglitz and Coping with the Climate Crisis: Mitigation Policies and Global Coordination (2018), with Rabah Arezki, Karim El Aynaoui and Maurice Obstfeld.