Alex Edmans

Last Updated on 12 November 2021 by Elza Dabola

Professor of Finance at London Business School (LBS), Alex Edmans is an expert in purposeful business, corporate governance, practical investment strategies, time management and behavioural finance.

Thanks to his unique combination of practical business experience and deep academic rigour, Alex is exceptional at presenting complex concepts in non-technical language and in a charismatic manner.  His TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World and TEDx talk The Social Responsibility of Business, have a combined 2.4 million views. He has also spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos and testified in the UK Parliament.

Edmans (together with PwC) has been appointed by the UK government to study the effect of share buybacks on investment and executive pay, making him a leading figure in the current reform of UK corporate governance. He serves on the Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee as well as on the Steering Group of The Purposeful Company, which encourages companies to pursue long-run purpose over short-run profit by proposing policy reforms.

Alex has written multiple articles for the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and Wall Street Journal and is frequently interviewed on TV and in the media.  His book, “Grow the Pie: How great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit”, was named to the Financial Times Business Books of the Year list for 2020.

Alongside being a Professor of Finance at LBS, he is also Mercers School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College in London where he gives public lectures on “How Business Can Better Serve Society”, “The Psychology of Finance”, and “Business Skills for the 21^st Century”.

Alex’s professional career began at Morgan Stanley in investment banking in London and fixed income sales and trading in New York.  He followed this by getting a PhD in Finance from MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar. Edmans became a finance professor at Wharton, where he was awarded tenure and won 14 teaching awards in six years at this prestigious business school. Following his success at Wharton, at LBS Edmans won the Excellence in Teaching award for best professor across all programs and the Best Teacher award for the MBA and MFA programmes.

Additionally, he has featured in Poets and Quants Best 40 Professors Under 40 and Thinkers50 Radar.