Research Affiliates has appointed London Business School Professor Alex Edmans, PhD, as an advisor. In this role, Edmans will support research initiatives around social responsibility and governance.

With research that cuts across executive compensation, governance, behavioural finance, corporate social responsibility, and investment strategies, Edmans’ work has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Economic Literature.
 
“I am delighted to join Research Affiliates and have the opportunity to contribute to its mission of bringing transformative insights and products to investors. While I hope to work on a broad range of topics, I am particularly excited about the possibility of developing robust implementation tools for ESG strategies,” says Edmans.
 
“Alex is a prolific researcher whose work spans a wide variety of topics,” says Vitali Kalesnik, head of Equity Research. “For example, in his work on social responsibility, he was able to show that employee job satisfaction increases shareholder value. This finding has profound implications: companies that treat their employees better both attract and retain better talent, improve productivity, and reward their shareholders with higher returns. Needless to say, I am eagerly looking forward to the opportunity to work closely with Alex.”
 
Edmans graduated from Oxford University, and obtained his PhD from MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar. He began his academic career at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 before moving to London Business School in 2013. He has won the Moskowitz Prize for Socially Responsible Investing, the FIR-PRI prize for Finance and Sustainability, the Investor Responsibility Research Centre prize, and the WRDS Award for Best Empirical Finance Paper at the WFA. Edmans has also been named a Rising Star of Corporate Governance by Yale University and a Rising Star of Finance by NYU/Fordham/RPI.
 
Edmans retains his affiliation with London Business School and the Centre of Corporate Governance. He will remain managing editor of the Review of Finance, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy research, and a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute.