Ahmed Tahoun

Professor Tahoun is a Professor at London Business School. Tahoun was named as one of the Top 40 Professors under 40. He has been a research scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Wharton School, a faculty member at the London School of Economics, a research fellow at the University of Valencia, and a banker at HSBC.

The current focus of Tahoun’s research is on "Text as Data." In particular, he develops methodologies to convert raw text into actionable data. These methods can predict the impact of systemic shocks, whether political events or global pandemics, and create firm-level metrics for various issues like cyber-security risk, inflation, and climate change. He adapts techniques from computational linguistics to construct data sets valuable for policymakers. These can be used to monitor country risk and sentiment, analyse risk transmission during crises, measure the risks, costs, and opportunities firms associate with specific shocks and policies, and compare impacts attributed to different sources.

Tahoun’s research also tackles important questions in society, ranging from the quid-pro-quo relations between politicians and the corporate world, the economic consequences of revolutions, and the global development of securities law in response to corporate scandals during the past 200 years. He has also been engaged in comparative international work on executive compensation, looking for the roots of cross-country differences in pay packages. Furthermore, Tahoun researches and publishes work on the economic outcomes of transparency. These studies aim to understand the impact of information provision and dissemination and question if more information always leads to better outcomes.

Tahoun has published his research in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, the Journal of Accounting and Economics, the Accounting Review and the Review of Finance.

The Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have covered his work. In the classroom, Tahoun teaches the MBA programme, and he delivers a course on managerial accounting tools and another course on organisational designs. Tahoun is currently an associate editor at the Journal of Accounting Research. He has been the recipient of ten consecutive grants from the prestigious Institute of New Economic Thinking; he has twice received LBS’s faculty research award; he was granted the Referee of the Year award by the Journal of Accounting Research and was made a member of its editorial board.

Tahoun did his doctoral training at six institutions in five countries: the Wharton School and Chicago Booth in the US, the London School of Economics and the University of Manchester in the UK, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, the University of Valencia in Spain, and Cairo University in Egypt.