Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at the London Business School, on Confronting Confirmation Bias and Growing the Pie.

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. 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, responsible business and behavioural finance. He is Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe, and was inducted as a Fellow of the Financial Management Association. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and World Economic Forum and been interviewed by Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and Sky Sports. Alex serves on the Steering Group of The Purposeful Company, a UK consortium of leaders in responsible business, and on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. The UK government appointed him (jointly with PwC) to study the alleged misuse of share buybacks and the link between executive pay and investment. Alex also serves as Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving a four-year programme of lectures to the public. His series are on The Principles of Finance (2021/2), The Psychology of Finance (2020/1), Business Skills for the 21st Century (2019/20) and How Business Can Better Serve Society (2018/9). Alex’s book, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, was featured in the Financial Times Best Business Books of 2020 and won the Financial Times award for Excellence in Sustainable Finance Education. He is a co-author of the 14th edition of Principles of Corporate Finance (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen). Alex was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021. He has won 23 teaching awards at Wharton and LBS, won the Finance for the Future award for Driving Change in the finance community, and featured in Thinkers50 Radar.