Professor Gordon L. Clark
Senior Consultant and Emeritus Professor
Profile
Gordon L Clark PhD DSc is Senior Consultant and Director & Professor Emeritus of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University. He has also been the Halford MacKinder Professor of Geography and Head of the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford.
He has held academic appointments at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, and Monash University where he was Professor of Geography, Director of the Institute of Ethics and Public Policy, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. More recently, he was the Sir Louis Matheson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Accounting and Finance at Monash University. He is an Elected Fellow of the British Academy, the UK Academy of Social Science, and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and has been an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the US National Academy of Sciences.
An expert about the global investment management industry, he has been a consultant to major public and private pensions funds and related organisations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK, and the USA. Currently, he is an employer-nominated trustee on the Oxford Staff Pension Scheme, is an advisor to Avida International, chairs the Ethics Committee of the IP Group, is an Executive Board member of Watermarq Limited, is an Advisor to The Ownership Project 2.0: Private Capital Owners & Impact of the Säid Business School, and is principal of Kalytix UK—a small venture capital company with global exposure.
At the Smith School, he promoted executive education and research in climate change management amongst large process-based companies and the investment strategies of global financial organisations on the buy-side and sell-side of the market. This has involved research partnerships with companies and intensive high-level briefings on global trends including the emerging map of climate change to 2050 and beyond. He also contributes to Oxford programmes on the nature and dimensions of sustainable investment.
The author of many books on finance and investment he is the co-author of Institutional Investors in Global Finance (OUP 2017) with Ashby Monk, Sovereign Wealth Funds with Ashby Monk and Adam Dixon (Princeton University Press 2013), Saving for Retirement (OUP 2012) with Janelle Knox-Hayes and Kendra Strauss, and The Geography of Finance (OUP 2007) with Dariusz Wójcik. His Pension Fund Capitalism (OUP 2000) is widely cited as the definitive treatment of the foundations of the global finance industry since 1970.
Recent papers include “Geographical variations in risk tolerance and the use of financial instruments” Finance & Space (2025) with Stefania Innocenti and Mads Hoefer, “Experience of financial challenges, retirement concerns, and planning: evidence from representative samples of workers in 16 countries” Journal of Pension Economics and Finance (2023) with Stefania Innocenti and Sarah McGill, “The significance of financial competence and risk tolerance in home-related expenditure by jurisdiction and regime” Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie (2021), and “Playing with your future: who gambles in DC pension plans?” International Review of Financial Analysis (2018) with Maurizio Fiaschetti, Peter Tufano and Michael Viehs.
Projects
Teaching
MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy
Corporate Environmental Management: The course informs students wishing to act as internal or external change agents for driving corporate environmental performance, as well as those wishing to understand the nature of the modern corporation for research purposes. The course is supported by a selection of practical and academic readings and by class discussion of relevant case studies used to illustrate the points of each lecture.
Corporate Social and Environmental Accountability: In this course, we consider the relationship between corporate responsibility and the role of financial markets in driving the long-term environmental decision-making of corporations. This provides us a way of understanding globalisation, corporate social and environmental standards, and the role of institutional investors in the global economy.
Current graduate research students
