Gudrun Johnsen

Senior Associate

Gudrun Johnsen is Assistant Professor of Corporate Governance at Copenhagen Business School. Prior to that she was a finance faculty member at Reykjavik University and the University of Iceland, as well as an Affiliated Researcher at the Research Center Companies, Markets, Society & the Environment, at the University of Oslo’s Law School. She also worked for the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department in 2004-2006.

In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, Gudrun was recruited by the Icelandic Parliamentary Special Investigation Commission, as a senior investigator, looking into the causes and events leading to the fall of the Icelandic banking sector in 2008. She was also appointed post-crisis to the Board of Directors of Arion bank, which was built on the ruins of the failed Kaupthing Bank. There, she was the longest serving director and the Vice Chair of the Board from 2010-2018.

Gudrun currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Pension Fund of Commerce, live.is. She is also an Economic Advisor to VR – the trade union of employees in commerce, services and offices, and a founding member and chair of the board of the Transparency International chapter in Iceland.

Gudrun holds a PhD in Economics from École Normale Supérieure in Paris, a MA degree in Statistics and a MA in Applied Economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as well as a BA in Economics from the University of Iceland. At CEP, she currently focuses on fiscal policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. She has published widely on the banking crisis in Iceland, and on corporate governance and sustainability in the Nordic countries.