Lei Zhao is an Associate Professor in Finance at ESCP Business School, where he teaches postgraduate courses in Portfolio Management, Derivatives, and Corporate Finance. Lei has an active research interest in banking, empirical asset pricing, and empirical corporate finance. He has published his research in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Journal of International Money and Finance. His research has attracted funding from the British Academy. He has presented his work at internationally recognised academic conferences, such as the meetings of the Financial Management Association (FMA) and the Paris December Finance Meetings.

Lei’s work on implicit government guarantees was shortlisted for the « leke van den Burg Prize » awarded by the ESRB Advisory Scientific Committee in 2015. His research paper on storage costs in the crude oil market won the best paper award at the annual conference of the Commodity and Energy Markets Association (2023). He won the best pitch award at the 2024 FMA European Conference, and he received the 2019 ESCP Teaching Award.

Lei holds a PhD in Finance from the ICMA Center, University of Reading. He is a CFA® charterholder and a member of CFA Society France. Prior to joining ESCP Europe in 2015, he was a teaching assistant at the University of Reading. He also worked for a commercial bank and an annuity trustee company in China.