Richard Priestley is a Professor in the Department of Finance at BI Norwegian Business School. His research has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, Review of Finance, Economic Journal, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Money Credit and Banking, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, and the Journal of Business.

He was the head of the department of finance at BI from 2011 to 2021 where he led an expansion of the department both in terms of the programmes offered, the faculty base, and the quality of research output. The department is now ranked as one of the best in Europe and now has over 500 students on various undergraduate and postgraduate finance programmes.

Professor Priestley has been a visiting professor at Manchester Business School, University of Manchester and has previously taught at the University of Reading and Brunel University. Currently, he is on sabbatical at the department of finance, Imperial College London.

His research interests span asset pricing, macro-finance, monetary policy and financial markets, international finance, and payout policies.

He as written extensively on how the Norwegian oil fund's active management from stock picking and real estate underperforms a simple passive strategy, wasting billions of dollars of public money annually.