Chendi Zhang is Professor of Finance and the Director of Exeter Sustainable Finance Centre. He is the Associate Dean for Research & Impact of the University of Exeter Business School. He specialises in sustainable and responsible finance, corporate finance, behavioural finance, and emerging markets.

He began his career working in investment banking in Shanghai. After his PhD from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, he worked as a consultant for the Latin America and Caribbean region of the World Bank in Washington DC. Before joining Exeter, he was a faculty member of Warwick Business School (2007-2019). He has also taught at Cambridge, Sheffield, and Tilburg universities. He is an external examiner for Imperial College Business School.

Professor Zhang's research has been covered by the Economist, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNN, CBS and Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Forum, presented at the annual meetings of American Finance Association, Western Finance Association, European Finance Association, SFS Cavalcade and FIRS, and appeared in research/policy paper series of NBER, CEPR, ECGI and World Bank. He has received research funding from the British Academy, Natural Environment Research Council, BNY Mellon, Royal Bank of Canada, and World Bank. 

He acted as a consultant on sustainable investing and emerging markets finance for the World Bank, International Finance Corporation (Washington DC), Robeco SAM (Zurich), JO Hambro, Bank of New York Mellon and Newton Investment Management (London). He held visiting academic appointments at the Universities of Boston, Miami, Tilburg, Beijing Normal, and CUFE (China).

Professor Zhang's research interests are in three interconnected areas: sustainable investing, corporate finance, and behavioural finance.

Sustainable Investing

• Socially responsible investments: performance and fund flows (Renneboog, Ter Horst, Zhang, JCF 2008, JBF 2008, and JFI 2011)
• Firm systematic risk and valuation of ESG factors: theory and empirical evidence (Albuquerque, Koskinen, Zhang, MS 2019; and Albuquerque, Koskinen, Yang, Zhang, RCFS 2020)
• Employee satisfaction and stock returns around the world (Edmans, Pu, Zhang, Li, MS 2024)
• Firm temperature sensitivity and mispricing (Cuculiza, Kumar, Xin, Zhang, MS Accepted 2025)

Corporate Finance

• Leveraged buybacks (Lei, Zhang, JCF 2016)
• Short-term debt around the world: theory and empirical evidence (Sorge, Zhang, Koufopoulos, JMCB 2017)
• Corporate political activism (Albuquerque, Lei, Rocholl, Zhang, JCF 2020)
• M&A and innovation (Farida, Fidrmuc, Zhang, WP 2023)

Behavioural Finance

• Investor myopia and risk taking: experimental evidence (Bellemare, Krause, Kröger, Zhang, EL 2005)
• Information salience and football betting (Palomino, Renneboog, Zhang, JCF 2009)
• Gambling sentiment and predictable returns (Chen, Kumar, Zhang, JFQA 2020)
• Dividend sentiment and payout policy (Kumar, Lei, Zhang, JCF 2022)