Jan Bena
Associate Professor and Finance Division Chair
Bank of Montreal Chair in International Finance
Jan Bena is an Associate Professor in the Finance Division at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia (UBC). Following an entrepreneurial stint and Ph.D. studies in economics at the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute (CERGE-EI) in Prague, Jan earned his Ph.D. in finance from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Jan joined the UBC Sauder School in 2009.
At UBC Sauder, Jan served as the director of the Ph.D. program in Finance from 2017 to 2020 and is currently the Chair of the Finance Division. He was the Program Chair for the 2019 Northern Finance Association (NFA) Annual Conference and later served as the President of the NFA. Since 2021, Jan has held the position of Academic Director at the Portfolio Management Foundation (PMF), and he is an Advisor to both the UBC Sauder Women+ in Finance Training (SWIFT) and the Aquanow DeFi Lab at Blockchain@UBC. Additionally, he is the Associate Editor of the Review of Corporate Finance Studies (RCFS).
Visit UBC Sauder Faculty ProfileReasearch interests
Jan’s research spans corporate R&D and innovation, private equity, entrepreneurship, decentralized finance (DeFi), and the nexus of finance and industrial organization. His work has been published in leading finance journals such as The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, and The Review of Financial Studies. He is a regular presenter at seminars worldwide and at major international conferences.
Teaching
Jan has taught various finance courses to students in the Bachelor of Commerce (BCom), Master of Management (MM), MBA, International MBA, Professional MBA, and Ph.D. programs at UBC Sauder, as well as in the Bachelor of International Economics (BIE) program offered by UBC Vancouver School of Economics (VSE). His teaching emphasizes the practical application of key finance concepts and theories in real-world investment and corporate finance scenarios. In 2021, he was honored with the UBC Sauder Alumni Talking Stick Award for significant pedagogical innovation. Additionally, Jan taught Capital Markets and Financial Derivatives courses at Donau-Universität Krems, Austria, from 2011 to 2015. During his Ph.D. studies, he taught a range of courses as a Tutorial Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 2005 to 2009.