Alex Edmans

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and Academic Director of the Centre for Corporate Governance. Alex graduated from Oxford University and then worked for Morgan Stanley in investment banking (London) and fixed income sales and trading (New York). After a PhD in Finance from MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar, he joined Wharton in 2007 and was tenured in 2013 shortly before moving to LBS.

Alex’s research interests are in corporate finance (corporate governance, executive compensation, investment/growth/innovation, and M&A), behavioural finance, and responsible business. He has published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Economic Literature. He is Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute. He was previously Associate Editor of the Review of Financial Studies and a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He won the Moskowitz Prize for Socially Responsible Investing, the FIR-PRI prize for Finance and Sustainability, the Investor Responsibility Research Centre prize, and the WRDS Award for Best Empirical Finance Paper at the WFA; was a finalist for the Smith-Breeden Prize for best paper in the Journal of Finance; and was named a Rising Star of Corporate Governance by Yale University and a Rising Star of Finance by NYU/Fordham/RPI.

Alex’s research has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, The Economist, and The Times, and he has been interviewed by Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and Sky Sports. Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, presented to the World Bank Board of Directors as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series, and given the TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World and the TEDx talk The Social Responsibility of Business with a combined 2.4 million views. He has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, World Economic Forum, and CityAM, and runs a blog, Access to Finance, that aims to make complex finance topics accessible to a general audience.

Alex serves on the Steering Group of The Purposeful Company, a UK consortium of leaders in responsible business, on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee, and as an Advisor to Research Affiliates. The UK government appointed him (jointly with PwC) to conduct a study on the effect of share buybacks on executive pay and investment. Alex also serves as Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving a four-year programme of lectures to the public. His 2019/20 lecture series is on Business Skills for the 21st Century and his 2018/19 series was on How Business Can Better Serve Society. His book, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, was named to the Financial Times Best Business Books of 2020.

At Wharton, Alex won 14 teaching awards in six years. At LBS, he won Best Teacher awards for both the MBA and Masters in Financial Analysis programmes and the Excellence in Teaching award for best professor across all programmes. He has been named to Poets and Quants Best 40 Professors Under 40 and Thinkers50 Radar.