Karl Schmedders

Why organisations work with Karl Schmedders

• He brings a computational finance lens to ESG, climate risk, and carbon pricing, so net zero plans get tested as financial decisions, not as messaging.
• His public position on the “just transition” gives executive teams a defensible way to talk about the social and governance side of ESG, without retreating into either greenwashing or culture war.
• He directs IMD’s Strategic Finance program and has taught finance to senior executives at Kellogg and IMD for over two decades, which means complex valuation and risk arguments arrive in language a non-finance board can act on.
• His research record in journals such as Econometrica, the Journal of Finance, and the Review of Financial Studies makes him a credible counterweight when consultants and asset managers are pitching the same story to the room.
• Board roles at LPX Group and SYLVA AG, plus advisory work with firms including ABB, Airbus, Maybank, and Julius Baer, mean the examples land in operating reality.

Biography highlights

• Professor of Finance at IMD; Director of the Strategic Finance program.
• PhD in Operations Research, Stanford University; Walter J. Gores Award for teaching at Stanford.
• Former Associate Professor at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University; L.G. Lavengood Professor of the Year, 2002.
• Former Professor of Quantitative Business Administration at the University of Zurich.
• Published in Econometrica, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science.
• Co-editor, Handbook of Computational Economics (Elsevier).
• Board member, LPX Group and SYLVA AG; Advisory Council member, Reward Value.
• Regular columnist on ESG and climate finance in I by IMD.

Biography

ESG has spent a decade as a marketing layer over corporate strategy. Karl Schmedders treats it as a finance problem. He starts from the externality, works through the price signal, and asks whether the company’s capital allocation reflects the climate position it has publicly committed to. That move, from narrative to numbers, is what most boards still find uncomfortable.

His authority for that move comes from a long career in computational finance. After a PhD in Operations Research at Stanford, he taught at Kellogg School of Management for over a decade, where he was named L.G. Lavengood Professor of the Year. He was Professor of Quantitative Business Administration at the University of Zurich before joining IMD in 2019, where he now directs the Strategic Finance program and teaches across the Executive MBA portfolio. His research has appeared in Econometrica, the Journal of Finance, and the Review of Financial Studies.

The applied work follows the same logic. As a board member of LPX Group and SYLVA AG, and an advisor to firms including ABB, Airbus, Maybank, and Julius Baer, he tests claims about climate strategy, executive pay, and financial risk against the underlying economics. His writing in I by IMD argues that carbon taxes are still too low to price the “mother of all externalities,” that climate financial risk is being understated on corporate balance sheets, and that companies are quietly admitting their net zero promises were unrealistic.

He is also one of the few finance economists making a public, technical case for the “just transition.” His argument is that ignoring the social and governance side of ESG, the cost borne by lower income households and developing economies, is the fastest way for the political consensus on climate to collapse. For a board that is being told ESG is either everything or a fraud, that is a more useful framing than either.

Key speaking topics

• Climate financial risk
• Carbon pricing and the economics of net zero
• ESG strategy and capital allocation
• Just transition and the social side of climate policy
• Strategic finance for non-finance executives
• Executive compensation and sustainability incentives
• Computational finance and quantitative decision making
• Sustainable investing and stranded assets

Ideal for

• Boards and CFO offices stress testing climate commitments against capital allocation
• Investment committees, asset owners, and asset managers reviewing ESG and sustainable investing strategies
• CSOs and Heads of Sustainability who need a finance-grounded counterpart to the consulting view
• Executive education audiences in Strategic Finance, EMBA, and senior leadership programs

Audience outcomes

• A clearer view of where their organisation’s net zero plan does and does not survive financial scrutiny.
• Concrete vocabulary for separating ESG substance from ESG narrative when investors and regulators ask.
• A working sense of how carbon pricing, stranded assets, and climate risk feed into corporate valuation.
• An economist’s case for the “just transition” that holds up in front of a sceptical board.
• Sharper questions to take into the next investment committee or strategy meeting.