Interview with Professor Alex Edmans

Our third interview of the series with Distinguished Accounting and Finance Professors is with  Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance, London Business School, Fellow of the British Academy, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Academic Impact Comes in Different Forms

1. 1. The importance of impact in academia—but impact need not mean "real-world" impact for everyone. Some academics add most value by focusing exclusively on top-quality research. Others do so by being department chair or president of a professional association.

1. 2. How academia involves both creating and disseminating knowledge—but dissemination involves other people's research, not just your own.

1. 3. How to balance conflicting priorities. If your goal is wider impact (inside or outside the profession), should you focus exclusively on academic research until tenure, and seek impact only afterwards?

1. 4. The importance of portraying your research honestly—and if we fail to do this, we lose what distinguishes academia from consultancy “research” produced for marketing purposes.

1. 5. In other business school fields (e.g. organisational behaviour), a book is seen as the pinnacle of the profession—bringing research to a broader audience. But in finance, it's looked down upon. Instead, the pinnacle of the profession is being invited to write a handbook chapter, which is more inward-facing.