The Fama of modern finance

When Eugene Fama enrolled at Chicago Booth School of Business in 1960, “finance was a joke”, he says in a candid and fascinating insight into his more than 50 years as a student, academic and teacher at the university.

The essay, published by Chicago Booth’s Capital Ideas, details Fama’s own history but also a short history of finance including how the efficient-market hypothesis was born.

Fama, who is often called the “father of modern finance”, calls the Black-Scholes paper on option pricing the most important paper in economics of the twentieth century.

“No other paper has to be learned by every single economist getting a PhD and has also created an industry – the derivatives industry.”

Fama, who also got into Harvard, chose to go to Chicago because he was advised that “it was more academically oriented than Harvard”.

He is the Robert R McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, and received a MBA and PhD from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Sponsored Content

“I love my work,” he says in the essay. “I have no intention of stopping as long as I’m breathing – and I may even do it after that.”

To read the full essay, click here.

Leave a Comment

Sort content by

Social networks in the investment web

Reels of financial data and analysis coupled with the occasional piece of market gossip or personal hunch are the time-honoured tools investors rely on in building an active portfolio. More recently, an element of sustainability or corporate governance analysis has tried to muscle into the process. Soon there will be another revolutionary option complementing financial

Eijffinger’s decade of financial repression

Financial repression will define the economic landscape for at least another decade, according to professor of financial economics at Tilburg University, Sylvester Eijffinger, which has serious implications for institutional investors. Eijffinger, who also is also a visiting professor at Harvard, sits on the monetary experts panel of the European Union and is an adviser to

Is reviving Europe a suspended apparition?

Getting Europe’s swelling institutional capital to support long-term projects that could benefit its uninspired economies was an idea that sent heads nodding around the continent as it suffered the brunt of the financial crisis. Get pension, insurance and foundation money into where it is most needed with the attraction of reliable long-term cash flows and

Let’s talk about underfunding

Even using the assets of the pension plan was not enough of a leg-up to save the city of Detroit from bankruptcy. As the last words in the song Put your hands up for Detroit by Fedde Le Grand say, it is system shutdown. The fiscal demise of this city may be a lesson for

Johnson urges pension simplicity

There is a David-and-Goliath feeling to the battle Michael Johnson, a research fellow at the London-based think tank the Centre for Policy Studies, is waging against the pension industry. His research, which lays out the case for radically simplifying all aspects of the United Kingdom’s pension sector, has earned him a reputation as a maverick.

Disparity in policy portfolio risk profiles

A policy portfolio is a poor reflection of investor preferences, argued Peter Bernstein. This philosophical question has now been empirically tested by MIT’s Mark Kritzman, who shows the inter-temporal disparity of a policy portfolio’s risk profile. He suggests a simple framework for addressing this deficiency. Kritzman encourages investors to replace rigid policy portfolios with flexible investment policies.

Previous