Charles Lee

Professor, Stanford University

Charles Lee
Charles M.C. Lee is the Joseph McDonald Professor of Accounting at the Graduate School of Business (GSB), Stanford University. He is also a senior academic fellow of the Asian Bureau of Financial and Economic Research (ABFER), and co-founder of Nipun Capital, LLC, a San Francisco-based asset management firm focused on Asian equities.

Professor Lee studies the effect of human cognitive constraints on market participants and other factors that impact the efficiency with which market prices incorporate information. His work is widely published in leading academic journals in accounting and finance, and he has received numerous awards and honors for this research. His teaching honors include nine school-wide Excellence Awards for MBA, MSx, and PhD education (at Michigan, Cornell, and Stanford). He has also given a lecture on effective teaching at seven Annual AAA New Faculty Consortiums.

From 2004 to July 2008, Dr. Lee was managing director at Barclays Global Investors (BGI; now Blackrock). As the firm’s Global Head of Equity Research and Co-Head of North America Active Equities, he led BGI’s world-wide active equity research team and was jointly responsible for its North American active equity business. During his tenure, the firm had over $300 billion USD in active equity strategies. He joined Stanford GSB as a visiting professor in July 2008 while continuing to serve as a senior consultant to BGI, and became a full-time faculty member in July 2009.

Professor Lee is former editor or associate-/co- editor of numerous academic journals in accounting and finance, including: the Accounting Review, Journal of Finance, Management Science, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Review of Accounting Studies, and the Financial Analysts Journal.

Professor Lee received his BMath from the University of Waterloo (1981), and his MBA (1989) and PhD (1990) from Cornell University. He has been a faculty member at the Michigan Business School (1990-95) and the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University (1996-2004). From 1995-96 he was visiting economist at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). At Cornell he held the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professorship in Management and was director of the Parker Center for Investment Research.

Prior to entering academic life, he spent five years in public accounting, the last three in the National Research Department of KPMG, Toronto, Canada. He holds a Certificate in Biblical Studies from Ontario Theological Seminary, and is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.