Michael Ewens studies the financial intermediation, innovation, and management of high-growth entrepreneurial firms. In this environment, which is characterized by extreme agency and information frictions, one can revisit fundamental issues in finance and economics. He is particularly interested in the source of value-added by financial intermediaries such as venture capital firms, the role of gender in entrepreneurship, and the differences between public and private ownership forms. All projects attempt to create new, large sample data, where earlier research had only a few industries or shorter time periods.

A research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Ewens is also associate editor of the Journal of Financial Economics, co-editor of the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, and associate editor at the Journal of Corporate Finance. Since 2006, Ewens has worked as a quantitative advisor for Correlation Ventures. He currently co-organizes the Southern California Private Equity Conference [with Arthur Kortweg (USC), Rick Townsend (UCSD), and Xinxin Wang (UCLA)], and the virtual Workshop on Entrepreneurial Finance and Innovation [with Yael Hochberg (Rice), Song Ma (Yale) and David Robinson (Duke)].

Before arriving at Caltech in 2014, Ewens received a PhD in economics from UC San Diego and was an assistant professor of finance and entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University (2010–2014). He was also a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business (2014), a visiting associate professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business (2019), a visiting professor at the Yale School of Management (2021), and a visiting scholar at Yale Law School (2021). He has received the Kauffman Junior Faculty Fellowship in Entrepreneurship Research (2013–2014) and the Berkman Junior Faculty Development Grant (Carnegie Mellon University, 2013).