Bilge Yilmaz
Wharton Private Equity Professor; Professor of Finance; Academic Director, Harris Family Alternative Investments Program, The Wharton School
Bilge is the Wharton Private Equity Professor and Professor of Finance at the Wharton School. He also leads the Harris Family Alternative Investments Program. Prior to his current appointment, he was a faculty member at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He received his first degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from Boğaziçi University, and his PhD in Economics from Princeton University.
Bilge’s research focuses on corporate finance, alternative investments and political economy. Recently, he has written on corporate governance, credit rating agencies, hedge funds, private equity, security design, short-selling constraints, corporate bankruptcy, and banks’ internal risk models. His earlier articles appeared in leading academic journals including the top three in the field; Econometrica, American Economic Review and Journal of Political Economy.
Bilge has designed a number of courses in corporate finance and a new curriculum on alternative investments for Wharton’s degree programs as well as Wharton Executive Education. He currently teaches mergers and acquisitions, private equity, hedge funds, shareholder activism, corporate bankruptcy and leads the Advanced Finance Program at Wharton Executive Education. Outside of Wharton, he is the founding partner of a boutique financial consulting firm. More recently, he joined the opposition against President Erdogan of Turkiye and serves as the Deputy Chairman of the second largest opposition party.