Alex Edmans FBA FAcSS FGC 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, sustainable investing, and behavioural finance. He is President of the Western Finance Association; Fellow, Director, and Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Financial Management Association; Fellow of the British Academy; and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He was previously Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe, and a Director of the American Finance Association.
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 3 million views. 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 serves as non-executive director of The Investor Forum and on Morgan Stanley’s Institute for Sustainable Investing Advisory Board, Novo Nordisk’s Sustainability Advisory Council, and Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. 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). He is a Fellow of Gresham College.
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: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions – And How To Exploit Them, will be published by Penguin Random House in September 2026.
Alex has won 31 teaching awards, was featured in Thinkers50 Radar, and was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021.