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

Over the industry? Change it

The pension and funds management industry is self-serving. There are too many players, there’s too much jargon, too much leakage and too much patting each other on the back. And that’s not just my opinion: the results of a 12-month research project, across 60 countries and more than 3000 investors concur. The research by State

Bit of a bubble in the property pool

In a landmark project, the £11-billion ($17.5-billion) Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF), a scheme for 10 local councils and hundreds of small regional employers including schools and charities, will invest in a series of residential housing projects with local authorities. Lauded as a completely new way of funding house building in the city, Manchester council

Inversion therapy:
the investor as benchmark

The pension and funds management industry needs to redefine performance to an absolute return measure, according to The Influential Investor: How Investor Behaviour is Redefining Performance, a paper that is the result of 12 months of research with more than 3000 investors and investment providers across 68 countries. The report, which sought to uncover the

Will Christmas be the final blow for Spain’s Social Security Reserve Fund?

The Spanish Social Security Reserve Fund is set to be depleted by another €7 billion ($9.05 billion) before the end of 2012, according to IESE Business School pension expert, Javier Diaz Gimenez. The $90-billion fund has already been asked by the government for $3.8 billion, which is likely to go towards a raise in state

Fiduciaries’ top concern is US gridlock

Endowments and foundations in the United States are more concerned with the US political and fiscal gridlock than the uncertainty caused by the European debt crisis, according to a survey of non-profit organisations by Mercer Hammond. Partner at Mercer Hammond, Russ LaMore, says the US situation dominated the global macroeconomic concerns of these investors, followed

UK’s NAPF conference focuses on three issues

The agenda at the United Kingdom’s National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) annual shindig in Liverpool’s Echo Arena on the banks of the Mersey couldn’t have been broader. From early analysis of auto-enrolment, the biggest shake-up of the industry in a generation and just days old, to life expectancy, Britain’s role in the European Union,

Previous