Aswath Damodaran

Aswath Damodaran was born in India and received his PhD in finance from UCLA. He has taught at NYU Stern School of Business since 1986. He is widely regarded as the world's foremost practitioner of corporate and equity valuation, earning the nickname "Dean of Valuation." His books — "Damodaran on Valuation," "Investment Valuation," and "The Dark Side of Valuation" — are standard texts in finance programs globally, providing comprehensive frameworks for valuing businesses across sectors, geographies, and stages of development. Each year Damodaran publishes detailed estimates of equity risk premiums, country risk premiums, and industry cost of capital that are used by practitioners and academics globally as reference inputs for valuation models. His blog "Musings on Markets" provides regular detailed valuation analyses of specific companies and market-wide observations, read by hundreds of thousands of practitioners. He offers his course materials, lecture slides, and datasets entirely free online — making sophisticated financial analysis tools accessible to anyone. Damodaran's pedagogical contribution has arguably reached more people than any other single finance educator: his NYU lectures uploaded to YouTube have been viewed millions of times. He is also known for his willingness to value controversial and hard-to-value assets — including cryptocurrencies, growth stocks at extreme valuations, and narrative-driven companies — applying rigorous fundamental analysis to questions where many analysts give up.