Alexandru Barbu is an Assistant Professor of Finance at INSEAD. He joined INSEAD in 2022 after obtaining a PhD in Finance from London Business School.
Alexandru teaches Corporate Financial Policy in the MBA programme. His research interests are in financial intermediation, insurance and household finance. In ongoing work, Alexandru looks at how financial intermediaries insure households against aggregate risk. He studies how differences in historical regulation have shaped the availability of private-sector provided market risk insurance across countries, as well as how gaps in consumer protection regulation have allowed insurers to recover losses in guaranteed return products after the financial crisis. His work has won, among others, the BlackRock Applied Research Award and the CEPR TFI Household Finance Award.
Alexandru holds a MSc in Economics from Barcelona Graduate School of Economics at Pompeu Fabra and a BSc in Economics from the Bucharest Academy of Economic Sciences. He was also a visiting PhD student at the University of Chicago Booth. Prior to his doctoral studies, Alexandru worked for the Deutsche Bundesbank and the European Central Bank.
