Alex Edmans
Professor of Finance; Fellow of the British Academy; Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences
BA (Oxford) PhD (MIT)
Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School, specialising in corporate finance, responsible business, sustainable investing, and behavioural finance. Alex is the author of Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit (a Financial Times Book of the Year for 2020), May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It, and the classic finance textbook Principles of Corporate Finance (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen). His latest book, The Madness of Markets: How Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions – And How to Exploit Them, will be published by Penguin Random House in September 2026. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist (“By Invitation”), 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 has won 30 teaching awards and was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021. He previously served as Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, delivering a four-year programme of public lectures covering The Principles of Finance, The Psychology of Finance, Business Skills for the 21st Century, and How Business Can Better Serve Society.
Alex graduated from Oxford University, worked at Morgan Stanley in investment banking and fixed income sales and trading, and completed a PhD at MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar. He joined Wharton in 2007, was tenured in 2013, and subsequently moved to London Business School. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the CFA Society of the UK.
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Academic and professional experience
Professor of Finance, London Business School
Non-Executive Director, The Investor Forum
Member, Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing Advisory Board
Member, Novo Nordisk Sustainability Advisory Council
Member, Royal London Asset Management Responsible Investment Advisory Committee
Director, American Finance Association
President-Elect, Western Finance Association
Fellow, Director, and Chair of the Ethics Committee, Financial Management Association
Appointed by the UK Government (jointly with PwC) to study the alleged misuse of share buybacks and the link between executive pay and investment
Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Business, Gresham College — public lecture series:
How Business Can Better Serve Society
(2018/9),
Business Skills for the 21st Century
(2019/20),
The Psychology of Finance
(2020/1),
The Principles of Finance
(2021/2)
Managing Editor, Review of Finance (2017–2022)
Associate Professor (tenured), Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (2013)
Assistant Professor, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (2007)
Investment Banking and Fixed Income Sales and Trading, Morgan Stanley, London and New York
Awards and honours
A&C Black Who’s Who (2026)
Fellow of the CFA Society of the UK (2025)
Fellow of the British Academy (2024)
LinkedIn Top Voice (2024-)
Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (2023)
Honorary Doctorate, Open Universiteit, The Netherlands (2023)
Professor of the Year, Poets&Quants (2021)
Fellow of the Financial Management Association (2021)
Grow the Pie
featured in Financial Times Best Business Books of 2020 (2020)
Thinkers50 Radar (2020)
TED Talk:
What to Trust in a Post-Truth World
(2 million views)
TEDx Talk:
The Pie-Growing Mindset
TEDx Talk:
The Social Responsibility of Business
(936,000 views)
30 teaching awards, London Business School and Wharton
Teaching portfolio
Our teaching offering is updated annually. Faculty and programme material are subject to change.