Efraim Benmelech

Efraim Benmelech was born in 1971

Benmelech was born in Jerusalem in 1971, the son of journalist Avraham Benmelech. He attended the Netiv Meir Bnei Akiva yeshiva high school in the city.

From 1990 to 1996 he served in the Paratroopers Brigade, leaving as a major. He then earned a BA in economics and business administration in 1999 and an MBA in 2001, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He worked at the Ministry of Finance in debt management and sat on the board of the Israel National Coal Supplies Company in 2000 and 2001.

He completed a PhD in finance at the University of Chicago in 2005 under Douglas Diamond. That year he joined the economics department at Harvard University, where he became associate professor in 2009. In 2012 he moved to the Kellogg School, where he directs the Guthrie Center for Real Estate Research and the Crown Family Israel Center for Innovation.

His research covers corporate finance, credit markets, collateral, credit ratings, financial crises and the economics of terrorism. In 2023 he was approached informally as a possible governor of the Bank of Israel but received no formal offer. In May 2024 he resigned from Northwestern's committee on preventing antisemitism, which he had co-chaired.