Karl Schmedders
Karl Schmedders is Professor of Finance at IMD. Trained in operations research, economics, and finance, he uses the tools of these three fields to analyze pressing problems facing business and society today. His work explores how companies should allocate capital and make decisions under uncertainty, as well as what climate change and the energy transition mean for valuation and strategy.
At IMD, his teaching covers corporate finance and strategy, decision-making under uncertainty and in complex environments, strategic foresight, AI and data science for business, the economics of climate change and its physical and transition risks, and the economics of the energy transition. He directs the Strategic Finance program and teaches in the Executive MBA program. He has worked with a wide range of companies, including ABB, Airbus, Eneva, Evonik, Julius Bär, Maybank, and Orkla, and is a frequent keynote speaker at company events and large international business conferences.
His research applies numerical methods to complex economic and financial models. He has published in leading academic journals including Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, and Operations Research. In his work on sustainability and climate change, he focuses on physical and transition risk, the economics and financing of the energy transition, and double materiality. He also examines the new generation of sustainability accounting and reporting standards, including TCFD, ISSB, and CSRD/ESRS, and what they mean for strategy, capital allocation, and remuneration. He argues that finance and economics offer powerful tools for the transition, that incentives and markets can be put to work rather than waited on, and that a just transition requires as much attention to the social and governance dimensions of ESG as to the environmental one.
Before joining IMD in 2019, Schmedders was Professor of Quantitative Business Administration at the University of Zurich and Associate Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, where he remains a visiting professor of Executive MBA Education.
He holds an MS and a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University, where he received the university-wide Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching. He has since received numerous further teaching awards, including the L.G. Lavengood Professor of the Year Award at Kellogg and best-teacher awards in the Kellogg, Kellogg-WHU, Kellogg-HKUST, Kellogg-Recanati, and Rochester-Bern Executive MBA programs. He is a board member of LPX Group and SYLVA AG, a Fellow of the Game Theory Society, and an SAET Economic Theory Fellow.
