Alex Edmans

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. 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 is a Director of the American Finance Association; Vice President of the Western Finance Association; and Fellow, Director, and Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Financial Management Association. From 2017-2022 he was Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe.

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 2.8 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 as a Non-Executive Director of The Investor Forum, on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Responsible Investing, on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee, and on Novo Nordisk’s Sustainability Advisory Council. The UK government appointed him (jointly with PwC) to study the alleged misuse of share buybacks and the link between executive pay and investment. Alex previously served as Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving a four-year programme of lectures to the public. His series were 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).

Alex’s book, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, was featured in the Financial Times Best Business Books of 2020 and won the Financial Times award for Excellence in Sustainable Finance Education; it has been or is being translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. He is a co-author of Principles of Corporate Finance (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen). His latest book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It, was published by Penguin Random House in 2024.

Alex was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021. He has won 26 teaching awards at Wharton and LBS, won the Finance for the Future award for Driving Change in the finance community, and featured in Thinkers50 Radar.

TED talk

Watch Alex's most recent TED talk