The Purpose of a Finance Professor

Dr. Alex Edmans (London Business School) presenting his Keynote presentation "The Purpose of a Finance Professor" at the 2021 FMA Annual Meeting in Denver, CO.
Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and Academic Director of the Centre for Corporate Governance. 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, behavioural finance, and responsible business. He has published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Economic Literature. He is Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, a Research Fellow of the CEPR, and a Fellow of the ECGI. He was previously Associate Editor of the Review of Financial Studies and a Faculty Research Fellow of the NBER.
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 talk The Social Responsibility of Business with a combined 2.2 million views. Alex also serves as Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving a four-year program of lectures to the public, and on Royal London Asset Management's Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. Alex's book, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit was named to the Financial Times Business Books of the Year for 2020. He has become a co-author of Principles of Corporate Finance with Brealey, Myers and Allen, for the upcoming 14th edition to be published in early 2022.