Professor Alex Edmans

ESRC Council member

Professor Alex Edmans FBA FAcSS is a member of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Council.

Alex is Professor of Finance at London Business School. Alex graduated from University of Oxford 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 and behavioural finance. He is:

  • a Director of the American Finance Association
  • President Elect of the Western Finance Association
  • Fellow, Director, and Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Financial Management Association
  • Fellow of the British Academy
  • Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences

From 2017 to 2022 he was Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe.

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 three million views.

He 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. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Alex’s book, ‘Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit’, was a Financial Times Book of the Year and has been translated into nine languages, and he is a co-author of the classic textbook ‘Principles of Corporate Finance’ with Brealey, Myers, and Allen.

His latest book, ‘May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It’ was published by Penguin Random House in 2024.

His upcoming book ‘The Madness Of Markets: How Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions – And How To Exploit Them’ will be published by Penguin Random House in September 2026.

He has won 30 teaching awards and was named Professor of the Year by Poets and Quants in 2021.

Last updated: 1 April 2026

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