Private equity, governance, and liquidity: A simple economic framework

Per (Pelle) Strömberg is the Centennial Professor of Finance and Private Equity at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and Visiting Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. During 2025, he is the BP Centennial Visiting Professor in Finance at the London School of Economics. He holds a PhD and MSc from Carnegie Mellon University, and an undergraduate degree from SSE. His research is in the field of corporate finance and governance, much of it focusing on private equity, and on the effect of climate policy of firms, and has been cited more than 15,000 times in Google Scholar. His current research projects include the role of business angels in entrepreneurial finance, the responses of firms to taxation of greenhouse gas emissions, and the interdependence between private and public equity markets.

His work has been acknowledged by best paper prizes in the Journal of Finance (3 times), Journal of Financial Intermediation, Western Finance Association, and the European Corporate Governance Institute. In 2011, he was awarded the Assar Lindbeck Medal, given bi-annually to an economist active in Sweden below the age of 45. He is a member and Second Vice President of the Swedish Royal Academies of Sciences, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) and served on the prize committee for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2012-2022 (including as a chair of the committee 2016-18). Outside of academia, he is currently a board member of AP4 and NASDAQ Clearing AB, and has previously served on the boards of Conversus Capital LP, AP6, and Evisens Securities AB.

Christopher Polk is a Professor of Finance at the London School of Economics and former Director of the Financial Markets Group. Prior to joining the LSE, Polk taught at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management; he has also been a visiting Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a visiting Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research interests are in asset pricing and include related topics in asset management, corporate finance, behavioral finance, and macroeconomics. His recent research has focused on incorporating stochastic volatility into asset pricing models and measuring the extent and consequences of crowded trading in popular hedge fund strategies.

Prof. Polk has published extensively in leading academic journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. He has won numerous professional awards, including the paper of the year at the Journal of Financial Economics in both 2002 and 2018. Prof. Polk has advised the Bank of England, Norges Bank and the EU European Securities and Markets Authority on topics related to his research. He has been an Associate Editor at the Journal of Finance and served as a member of the Norges Bank Investment Management Allocation Advisory Board. He currently sits on the LSE Investment Subcommittee that advises the investment activity of the School’s Endowment.

Prof. Polk holds a BS in physics and economics from Duke University and a PhD in finance from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business where he studied under the 2013 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences, Eugene Fama.