10 Professors Finance Professionals Should Follow in 2026

Devon Coombs

Teaching Professor of Finance, Santa Clara University · CPA, MBA

Best reason to follow: Applied finance, free education, and the intersection of finance and AI

My teaching sits closer to the practitioner end of finance.

Before moving into the classroom, I worked in Big Four consulting and later in Google Cloud finance, including complex commercial transactions. I still work with corporate finance and accounting organizations, so much of what I teach starts with a practical question: how would someone actually use this concept to make a better decision?

I publish free courses in Corporate Finance, Real Estate Finance, Entrepreneurial Finance, and Applied AI for Finance. They are available without an account, alongside financial models, calculators, definitions, and other teaching resources.

My book, The 10 Laws of Finance, is built around a similar premise: finance becomes much easier to understand when the underlying principles are connected to real decisions rather than taught as disconnected formulas.

I also teach finance and accounting teams how to use AI in actual business workflows, which increasingly influences how I think finance should be taught.

I would follow my work when: you want applied finance, business examples, free structured courses, or practical AI applications for finance professionals.

I would go somewhere else when: you want the deepest available treatment of valuation, asset pricing, behavioral finance, or another academic specialty. Several professors below have spent decades defining those fields.

Aswath Damodaran

Kerschner Family Chair in Finance Education · Professor of Finance, NYU Stern

Best reason to follow: Learning how to value almost anything

If someone asked me where to learn valuation for free, I would send them to Aswath Damodaran.

Damodaran teaches corporate finance and valuation at NYU Stern and has spent decades making an unusual amount of his teaching available publicly. His website contains lectures, spreadsheets, datasets, valuation tools, and course material, while his public classes work through real companies rather than sanitized textbook examples. NYU describes his teaching and research interests as corporate finance, valuation, and understanding market pricing and value drivers.

His books include Investment Valuation, Applied Corporate Finance, The Little Book of Valuation, Narrative and Numbers, and The Corporate Life Cycle.

What makes his material particularly useful is that he exposes the assumptions. You can disagree with a valuation, change the inputs, and see exactly why the answer changes.

I would follow Damodaran when: you want to learn valuation, corporate finance, equity risk premiums, cost of capital, or how narrative and numbers interact in valuing a business.

I would start here: his free NYU valuation and corporate finance materials before paying for most introductory valuation courses.

Robert J. Shiller

Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics, Yale University · Professor of Finance and Fellow, International Center for Finance

Best reason to follow: Understanding why financial markets behave less rationally than the models suggest

Robert Shiller's work is useful when markets stop looking like neat finance equations.

He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for empirical analysis of asset prices and has spent much of his career studying financial markets, behavioral economics, housing, speculative bubbles, and the stories people use to make economic decisions. Yale currently lists him as Sterling Professor Emeritus of Economics and Professor of Finance and Fellow at the International Center for Finance.

He co-developed the Case-Shiller home-price indices and is associated with the cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings measure commonly called the Shiller CAPE. His books include Irrational Exuberance and Narrative Economics.

His Financial Markets course is also unusually accessible. Shiller's own Yale site reports more than 2.2 million learners enrolled in the course.

I would follow Shiller when: you want to understand bubbles, investor psychology, housing markets, asset prices, or why narratives can become economically consequential.

I would not use his work as: a market-timing system. Behavioral explanations can help us understand markets without making near-term prices predictable.

Jeremy Siegel

Russell E. Palmer Professor Emeritus of Finance, Wharton

Best reason to follow: Putting short-term market noise against long-run financial evidence

Jeremy Siegel is most closely associated with one question: what does the historical evidence actually say about owning equities for long periods?

He joined Wharton in 1976 and is now the Russell E. Palmer Professor Emeritus of Finance. His research interests include financial markets, long-run asset returns, demographics, and macroeconomics.

His best-known book, Stocks for the Long Run, reached its sixth edition in 2022 and remains a useful counterweight to the tendency to make long-term investment decisions based on whatever markets did last week.

Siegel formally retired from teaching in 2021 but has remained active in public market commentary.

I would follow Siegel when: you want historical perspective on equity returns, inflation, interest rates, monetary policy, and long-horizon investing.

The useful discipline: even when you disagree with his market outlook, his long-run framing forces short-term claims into historical context.

Ethan Mollick

Associate Professor of Management · Co-Director, Generative AI Labs at Wharton

Best reason to follow: Understanding what generative AI actually means for knowledge work

Ethan Mollick is the deliberate exception to the finance-professor label on this page.

He is an Associate Professor of Management at Wharton, not a finance professor. But I would put his work in front of almost every finance professional because AI is rapidly changing how analysis, research, communication, modeling, and other knowledge work gets done.

Mollick studies AI, innovation, entrepreneurship, and education and co-directs Wharton's Generative AI Labs. His book Co-Intelligence became a New York Times bestseller, and his One Useful Thing newsletter combines research with frequent experiments using new AI capabilities.

What I find useful is that he tests the technology. His work tends to show what current systems can do, where they fail, and how human work changes around them rather than treating AI as either magic or hype.

I would follow Mollick when: you want to understand how AI changes professional work, management, education, entrepreneurship, and organizational behavior.

For finance specifically: use Mollick for the general principles of working with AI, then combine them with finance-domain expertise before applying the tools to material accounting or financial decisions.

Mihir A. Desai

Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, Harvard Business School · Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Best reason to follow: Developing better intuition for corporate finance

Mihir Desai is particularly good at explaining finance without reducing it to formulas.

He is the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School and also a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. His academic work spans corporate finance, international finance, taxation, and the internal capital markets of multinational businesses.

His books The Wisdom of Finance and How Finance Works are good examples of his teaching style. They make concepts such as leverage, capital allocation, valuation, risk, and corporate decision-making intuitive without pretending the underlying economics are simple.

That is harder than it sounds.

A lot of finance education teaches students to calculate an answer before teaching them how to think about the answer.

I would follow Desai when: you want corporate finance intuition, international finance, tax, capital allocation, or material aimed at executives and non-specialists.

I would particularly recommend him to: managers who need to understand finance well enough to make decisions but do not intend to become financial economists.

Campbell R. Harvey

J. Paul Sticht Professor, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business

Best reason to follow: Empirical finance, macro-financial signals, and serious work on new financial markets

Campbell Harvey has an unusually broad research footprint.

He is a Professor of Finance at Duke Fuqua, a former president of the American Finance Association, and a former editor of The Journal of Finance. His work spans investments, emerging markets, corporate finance, behavioral finance, financial econometrics, decentralized finance, and computer science. Duke reports more than 150 scholarly articles across those areas.

Harvey's doctoral research helped establish the relationship between an inverted yield curve and subsequent recessions. More recently, he has been one of the academics willing to treat crypto, blockchain, decentralized finance, and stablecoins as subjects worthy of serious finance research rather than dismissing or promoting them reflexively.

His four-course decentralized-finance specialization has attracted more than 100,000 Coursera students, and Duke says he added courses on gold, Bitcoin, and stablecoins in 2026.

I would follow Harvey when: you want empirical markets research, the yield curve, asset allocation, emerging markets, crypto, DeFi, or an academic treatment of financial innovation.

What makes him useful: he is comfortable crossing boundaries between traditional finance and markets that have not yet settled into traditional finance textbooks.

Alex Edmans

Professor of Finance, London Business School

Best reason to follow: Learning how to distinguish evidence from a persuasive story

Alex Edmans teaches finance, but one of the most useful things he teaches is how to evaluate claims.

He is Professor of Finance at London Business School and a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences. His research spans corporate finance, responsible business, sustainable investing, and behavioral finance.

His books Grow the Pie and May Contain Lies tackle two areas where business conversations routinely get ahead of the evidence: claims about stakeholder capitalism and claims built from statistics, studies, anecdotes, and narratives.

He also co-authors Principles of Corporate Finance with Richard Brealey, Stewart Myers, and Franklin Allen, placing his public-facing work alongside mainstream academic corporate finance rather than outside it. London Business School reports that he has won 30 teaching awards.

I would follow Edmans when: you want corporate governance, responsible business, behavioral finance, or better tools for deciding whether an impressive-looking claim is actually supported by evidence.

I would especially recommend his work to: executives and finance professionals who consume a lot of charts, studies, benchmarking, ESG claims, consultant research, and management narratives.

Annamaria Lusardi

Professor of Finance, by courtesy, Stanford Graduate School of Business · Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Best reason to follow: Understanding what people actually know about money and why it matters

Annamaria Lusardi's work deals with a basic problem that sophisticated finance sometimes overlooks: a large share of the population does not understand basic financial concepts well enough to make informed decisions.

She is Professor of Finance, by courtesy, at Stanford Graduate School of Business, a Senior Fellow at SIEPR, and Director of Stanford's Initiative for Financial Decision-Making.

With Olivia Mitchell, Lusardi developed the Big Three financial-literacy questions covering interest compounding, inflation, and risk diversification. Stanford describes those questions as a leading international standard for measuring financial literacy.

Her research helps connect financial knowledge with household decisions, retirement planning, inequality, policy, and education.

I would follow Lusardi when: you care about personal finance education, financial literacy, household decision-making, retirement, or whether financial knowledge actually changes outcomes.

The broader lesson for finance educators: complexity is not a virtue if the audience cannot use what we teach.

Burton G. Malkiel

Chemical Bank Chairman's Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Princeton University

Best reason to follow: Understanding the case for simple, low-cost investing

Burton Malkiel has spent more than half a century making an argument that initially sounded much more radical than it does today.

The first edition of A Random Walk Down Wall Street appeared in 1973, before publicly available index funds existed. Malkiel argued that most investors would be better served by broadly diversified, passively managed portfolios than by trying to identify managers or securities capable of consistently beating the market.

The book reached its 50th-anniversary and 13th edition in 2023. Princeton credits it with helping encourage institutional and individual adoption of index funds.

The idea has become so mainstream that it is easy to forget how much investment management had to change for it to become conventional wisdom.

I would follow Malkiel when: you want to understand index investing, diversification, market efficiency, asset allocation, and the evidence against unnecessary investment complexity.

I would pair his work with: thoughtful critiques of passive investing and market efficiency rather than treating any investment philosophy as unquestionable.