Peter DeMarzo is The John G. McDonald Professor of Finance, faculty co-director for Stanford LEAD, and former senior associate dean at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has published research on corporate investment and financing, asset securitization, financial contracting, and market regulation. Recent work has examined the optimal design of securities, leverage dynamics, compensation mechanisms, regulation of insider trade, bank capital regulation, and the influence of information asymmetries on corporate disclosures and investment. He is co-author of Corporate Finance and Fundamentals of Corporate Finance (Pearson 2020). He has served as president of the Western Finance Association and the American Finance Association. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Finance Association, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Before joining Stanford, DeMarzo was on the faculty of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and a national fellow at the Hoover Institution. He received a PhD in economics and an MS in operations research from Stanford University, and a BA in cognitive science and in applied mathematics from UC San Diego. His research has received best paper awards from the Review of Financial Studies, the Western Finance Association, and the Utah Winter Finance Conference. He has won best teaching awards at both Stanford GSB and the Haas School of Business. He currently teaches MBA and PhD courses in Corporate Finance and Financial Modeling.