Alex Edmans

Alex Edmans’ background

Alex has a unique combination of deep academic rigour and practical business experience. He is particularly noted for his ability to present complex concepts in non-technical language and an engaging, dynamic manner. Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, 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 2.5 million views. He is also Mercers School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving four public lecture series on “How Business Can Better Serve society”, “Business Skills for the 21st Century”, “The Psychology of Finance”, and “The Principles of Finance”. His series on Business Skills for the 21st Century covered topics such as time management, finding purpose in your career, public speaking, mental and physical wellness, critical thinking, and the growth Mindset.

Alex is a leading figure in the reform of business to serve wider Society. His book, “Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit”, was named to the Financial Times Books of the Year for 2020 and has been or is being translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. The UK government appointed him (jointly with PwC) to study the effect of share buybacks on investment and executive pay. He serves on the Steering Group of The Purposeful Company (which seeks to embed purpose into the heart of business), as a non-executive director of The Investor Forum (which promotes collaborative engagement between investors and companies), and on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. He has written several articles for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review.

Alex has published over 20 articles in the world’s most elite academic journals and is one of the most cited finance professors of his generation. He serves as Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe. He is a co-author of the classic textbook “Principles of Corporate Finance”, with Brealey, Myers, and Allen, widely known as the “bible” of finance. Alex began his professional career at 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 became a finance professor at Wharton, where he was granted tenure. He has won 23 teaching awards at Wharton and LBS, and was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021, the fifth professor and first outside the US to win this award.