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, responsible business and behavioural finance. 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; 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 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 talks The Pie-Growing Mindset and The Social Responsibility of Business with a combined 2.5 million views. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and World Economic Forum and been interviewed by Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and Sky Sports.
Alex serves on the Steering Group of The Purposeful Company, a UK consortium of leaders in responsible business, and on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. The UK government appointed him (jointly with PwC) to conduct two studies on the alleged misuse of share buybacks and the link between 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 series are on The Principles of Finance (2021/2), The Psychology of Finance (2020/1), Business Skills for the 21st Century (2019/20) and How Business Can Better Serve Society (2018/9). His book, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, was named to the Financial Times Best Business Books of 2020 and won the Financial Times award for Excellence in Sustainable Finance Education.
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 was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants, won the Finance for the Future award for Driving Change in the finance community, and featured in Thinkers50 Radar.