Carl Kester is a Baker Foundation Professor and the George Fisher Baker Jr. Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. He is a member of the Finance Unit. He served as Deputy Dean for Academic Affairs (2006-2010), Chairman of the Finance Unit (2005-2006), and Senior Associate Dean and Chairman of the MBA Program (1999 to 2005). He teaches corporate finance in both the School’s MBA and Executive Education programs. Professor Kester is a four-time recipient of The Robert F. Greenhill Award for outstanding service to Harvard Business School.
Professor Kester’s research and course development focuses on corporate finance and corporate governance. He is the author or co-author of numerous case studies and articles on these topics. More than a million copies of his cases have been sold worldwide. His book, Japanese Takeovers: The Global Contest for Corporate Control, which is a comprehensive field study exploring the Japanese M&A wave of the 1980s and 1990s, was the winner of the O’Melveny & Myers Centennial Grant award. Professor Kester was the co-editor of the leading volume of finance cases used worldwide, Case Problems in Finance (Irwin/McGraw-Hill), now in its twelfth edition, and Case Problems in International Finance (Irwin/McGraw-Hill). His research has been presented to academic and corporate executive audiences throughout North America, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Among these are the Council on Foreign Relations, the Financial Executives Institute, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Shanghai Stock Exchange, The Strategic Planning Society, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and the World Economic Forum.
Under Professor Kester's leadership of HBS's academic programs, a new course on leadership, corporate accountability, and business ethics, and another on entrepreneurial management, were introduced into the MBA Program’s required curriculum; the required finance curriculum was redesigned; and the elective curriculum in the Program’s second year was rebalanced and expanded to improve course development opportunities for faculty and course selection options for students. The MD/MBA, MBA/MPP and MBA/MPA-ID joint degree programs between HBS and Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Kennedy School, respectively, were also created and launched under his supervision. He currently serves as Co-Chair for both of these joint degree programs.
In addition to his work at HBS, Professor Kester is currently a member of the Committee to Visit Harvard Medical School and School of Dental Medicine, which reports to the University's Board of Overseers. He has chaired the Harvard University Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, and served on the Harvard University Health Plans Subcommittee, the Harvard University Committee on Calendar Reform, and the Harvard University Employees Credit Union Board of Directors.
Professor Kester’s consulting activities have involved him with a wide variety of organizations on finance-related topics such as corporate valuation, capital budgeting, real option valuation, and mergers and acquisitions. He has worked with many corporations including J.P. Morgan, IBM, G.E. Capital, Merck & Co., the National Football League, the Standard Chartered Bank, the World Bank, and Xerox Corporation, among others. He is Chairman of the BlackRock Capital Investment Advisors Mutual Funds Complex, which oversees private credit and private equity mutual funds. He is also Vice Chairman of the BlackRock Fixed Income Mutual Funds Complex. From 2005 to 2008, he was also an independent trustee of Access Capital Strategies Community Investment Fund, Inc., a closed-end mutual fund that enables financial institutions to invest in loans made in low-income areas in such a way as to qualify for Community Reinvestment Act credits.
Professor Kester is past Chair and currently Vice Chair and Governor of the Board of Governors of the Handel and Haydn Society, a Boston-based musical society featuring an internationally recognized chorus and period instrument orchestra playing historically informed baroque and classical music. He also served as a trustee (1988-2002), and as President of the Board of Trustees (1999-2002), of the Nashoba Brooks School, an independent school for boys and girls (pre-school through grade 3) and girls (grades 4 through 8).
An economics graduate of Amherst College, Professor Kester also holds advanced degrees from Harvard Business School (MBA), and the London School of Economics and Political Science (M.Sc.). He received his Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where his doctoral thesis, Growth Options and Investment: A Dynamic Perspective on the Firm’s Allocation of Resources, was the winner of the Advanced Management Program Thesis Fellowship prize. Professor Kester is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Finance Association, and the Financial Management Association.
