Sascha Steffen

DWS Senior Chair in Finance and Professor of Finance at Frankfurt School of Finance & Management; Director of the Centre for European Transformation; member of the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board.

My research is on how private capital lends: direct lending and its cycle, payment-in-kind as the first stage of stress absorption, the funding structure of credit funds, bank credit lines to nonbanks, and the contracting of leveraged loans and CLOs. It appears in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies and the Annual Review of Financial Economics, and has been supported by the FDIC, the DFG, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and the ECB's Lamfalussy Fellowship.

Since 2026 I publish the Private Credit Radar, quarterly default and stress indicators for private credit computed from public filings, with a research team at the Centre for European Transformation.

Before Frankfurt School I held appointments at the University of Mannheim and at ESMT Berlin, and was a senior research fellow at Leeds University Business School. I am a Research Fellow of CEPR and of SAFE, Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Stability and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance. Before academia I worked in Deutsche Bank's risk management division in Frankfurt and New York (2000–2005).