Miguel Palacios is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University. His recent work focuses on the intersection of human capital and asset-pricing, studying the size and riskiness of human capital, and measuring the effect that human capital has on the riskiness of firms. Miguel has also worked on innovative instruments for financing education. On this subject he published Investing in Human Capital (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and co-founded Lumni Inc. Investing in Human Capital, endorsed by Robert Shiller as "...the authoritative work on the revolution that is under way to integrate human capital into our financial system", builds the case for using innovative financial instruments based on students' future earnings to finance education. Lumni is a practical implementation of the ideas presented in his book, currently financing students in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and the United States.

Palacios received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia in 1997,  an M.B.A. from the Darden Business School, University of Virginia in 2001, and an M.A. in Economics and Ph.D. in Business Administration-finance from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 and 2009 respectively.