Professorships provide salary, research and grant support for life-changing work, and attract brilliant undergraduate and graduate students to SSE. An endowed professorship can be permanent and thereby pass from one holder to the next. It can also be for a fixed-term or established for a specific individual.

Single large investments create a lasting impact and enable the School’s long-term growth. The funding is exclusively connected to a specific purpose, which facilitates long-term planning. The holder of the professorship receives long-term support until the professor retires or leaves the School. Endowed professorships play an important role in the strategic planning of leading universities around the world because they represent an enduring commitment to research.

The first endowed professorship at the Stockholm School of Economics was established in 1917. That year the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation was founded, and one of the first donations it made was to establish the A. O. Wallenberg Chair in Economics. It is currently held by Jörgen Weibull and was previously held by Assar Lindbeck. Since then, the School has established approximately twenty endowed professorships, most of them in the name of prominent Swedish industrialist families such as Wallenberg, Söderberg, Bonnier and Persson.