Michael Ewens

I am the David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School’s finance division. I research the financing of high-growth startups and financial intermediation via venture capital and private equity. My research aims to understand if and how financial intermediaries in private equity add value, and when they do, what that teaches us about financing and operational frictions faced by companies. I am also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), associate editor of the Review of Financial Studies, associate editor at the Journal of Financial Economics, co-editor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy and Associate Editor at the Journal of Corporate Finance. I received my economics PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2010. Since 2006 I have worked as a quantitative advisor for Correlation Ventures, a quantitative-focused venture capital firm based in San Diego, CA. From 2010 to 2014, I was on the faculty at Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and from 2014 – 2022 I was on the faculty at Caltech as a Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship. I co-organize the Columbia Private Equity Conference (with Arthur Kortweg (USC), Song Ma (Yale), and Rick Townsend (UCSD)), the virtual Workshop on Entrepreneurial Finance and Innovation (with Camille Hebert (Univ. of Toronto), Song Ma (Yale) and Melanie Wallskog (Duke)) and mentor PhD students in the WEFI Fellows program.