The Late Professor Denis Gromb (RIP)

ECGI and our members sadly mourned the loss of Denis Gromb after passing away on 30 October 2022. Denis was the Antin I.P. Chair Professor of Finance at HEC Paris. He was appointed a research associate of ECGI in 2004 and elected a Fellow in 2014. He was a gifted economist and a warm-hearted man.

Tributes from his colleagues and friends described with emotion, a brilliant and kind professor, a role model who shared his time generously with students and colleagues. His friends Mike Burkart, Dimitri Vayanos and David Webb published a moving tribute in which they reflected that "he understood economic models and ideas more deeply than most economists. He could understand connections between seemingly unconnected models, and could organize complicated theories in the clearest of ways. This was reflected in his teaching. Not only was he a very popular teacher, for MBA and PhD students alike, but also the teaching notes that he developed for his MBA and PhD courses became a gold standard that academics in other universities were using to base their courses on. He wrote or co-wrote highly influential papers in corporate finance and its interface with financial intermediation and asset pricing, and was widely viewed as one of the top theorists in corporate finance worldwide."  
 

Biography

The Late Denis Gromb was the Antin I.P. Chair Professor of Finance at HEC Paris. He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, where he also obtained a Ph.D. in Economics while visiting the London School of Economics.

His principal research interests included corporate finance, corporate governance, banking, the economics of organizations and the limits to arbitrage in financial markets. His articles were published in leading academic journals in Economics and Finance.

Denis taught courses related to Corporate Finance in different programs : Grande Ecole, Master in Economics, Part-time MBA, Executive MBA, and the Executive MSc in Finance.

He was previously on the Finance faculty at MIT (1995-2001), London Business School (2001-2008), and INSEAD (2008-2015), and visited the London School of Economics (2007-2008).

Selected publications include:

·       “Large Shareholders, Monitoring and the Value of the Firm” with M. Burkart and F. Panunzi, Quarterly Journal of Economics (1997)

·       “Why Higher Takeover Premia Protect Minority Shareholders” with M. Burkart and F. Panunzi, Journal of Political Economy (1998)

·       “Equilibrium and Welfare in Markets with Constrained Arbitrageurs” with D. Vayanos, Journal of Financial Economics (2002)

·       “Public Trading and Private Incentives” with A. Faure-Grimaud, Review of Financial Studies (2004)

·       “Collusion and the Organization of Delegated Expertise” with D. Martimort, Journal of Economic Theory (2007)

·       “Limits of Arbitrage: The State of the Theory” with D. Vayanos, The Annual Review of Financial Economic (2010).

·       “Imperfect Competition in the Interbank Market for Liquidity as a Rationale for Central Banking” with V. Acharya and T. Yorulmazer, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics (2012).

·       “Legal Investor Protection, and Takeovers” with M. Burkart, H. Muller, and F. Panunzi, Journal of Finance (2014).

Education
1994-1995: Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Free University of Brussels' ECARE

1991-1994: Ph.D. Economics, Ecole Polytechnique

1992-1994: Visiting the London School of Economics' Financial Markets Group

1989-1990: DEA, Mathematical Economics, Ecole Polytechnique and Sorbonne

1986-1989: Diplome d'ingénieur, Ecole Polytechnique