Professor of Finance
London Business School
Mercers School Memorial
Emeritus Professor of Business
Gresham College
Director
American Finance Association
Non-Executive Director
The Investor Forum
Welcome to my website! I’m Alex Edmans, a Professor of Finance.
I focus on purposeful business, sustainable investing, corporate governance, and behavioural finance.
This website contains both academic research and resources for practitioners. The latter include newspaper articles, submissions to policy consultations, blog posts and talks.
For further materials on purposeful business or sustainable investing, please view my sister website www.growthepie.net.
Homepage
Sept 23: New paper, Does the Carbon Premium Reflect Risk or Mispricing? Companies with higher carbon emissions enjoy higher earnings surprises; earnings announcement returns account for 30-50% of the carbon premium. The carbon premium may result from outperformance (companies can “get away with” emitting) rather than a higher cost of capital.
Sept 23: CEO Compensation: Evidence From the Field forthcoming in Journal of Financial Economics. We survey directors and investors on how they set CEO pay in practice, revealing a number of departures from mainstream academic models. Incentives are used to fairly reward performance ex-post, rather than incentivize effort ex ante.
July 23: Applying Economics – Not Gut Feel – To ESG forthcoming in Financial Analysts Journal. ESG is no different from any other investment that generates financial and social value. Thus, we can apply decades of academic research on corporate finance, asset pricing, and welfare economics to ESG issues rather than shooting from the hip.
Apr 23: New paper, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Perceptions of DEI by employees are unrelated to the standard measures of demographic diversity focused on by academics and practitioners. DEI is correlated with superior future accounting performance but demographic diversity is not.
Apr 23: Employee Satisfaction, Labor Market Flexibility, and Stock Returns Around The World forthcoming in Management Science. Companies with high employee satisfaction outperform peer firms, but only in countries with high labor market flexibility. ESG strategies should take institutional context into account.
Mar 23: The End of ESG published in Financial Management. ESG is both very important and nothing special. It’s very important for long-term value, and thus relevant for everyone, not just ESG folks. It’s nothing special versus other drivers of value and shouldn’t be put on a pedestal.
Jan 23: Learnings From 1,000 Rejections. Common themes from rejection letters for nearly 1,000 manuscripts at the Review of Finance, which aim to provide guidance for future research.
A Progressive’s Case for Getting Rid of ‘ESG’
Does Sustainable Investing Really Help the Environment? (Wall Street Journal debate with Tariq Fancy)
No Stakeholder Left Behind: The Dangers of ESG Metrics
Is There Really a Business Case for Diversity?
Is Sustainable Investing Really A Dangerous Placebo? A response to Tariq Fancy
What Stakeholder Capitalism Can Learn From Jensen and Meckling (ProMarket)
What Stakeholder Capitalism Can Learn From Milton Friedman (ProMarket)
May 22: The Pie-Growing Mindset TEDx talk
Nov 21: ESG: Do We Need It and Does It Work? Talk hosted by European Corporate Governance Institute / Indiana Institute for Corporate Governance
Oct 21: The Purpose of a Finance Professor. Keynote speech at the 2021 Financial Management Association annual meeting. Write-up.
Oct 21: The Promise of Stakeholder Capitalism: Illusory or Real. Debate with Lucian Bebchuk, moderated by the FT’s Gillian Tett
Jan 21: Is Short Termism Really a Problem? Talk at the American Finance Association 2021 annual meeting (special session on “Short-Termism and Investment”)
Dec 20: The Case For Stakeholder Capitalism. Debate with Lucian Bebchuk, moderated by the FT’s Gillian Tett
Nov 20: Critique of European Commission’s Study on Sustainable Corporate Governance. Talk at European Corporate Governance Institute