Yale Professors Stephen Ross and Kenneth French will join the Sloan School of Management's finance department on July 1. Professor Ross will have a joint appointment with the MIT Department of Economics.
Dr. Ross has been the Fischer Black Visiting Professor at Sloan this year. Dr. French, the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Management Studies at the Yale School of Management, is a leader in the empirical analysis of capital markets.
"We are extremely pleased to have Steve Ross and Ken French join the Sloan faculty," said Sloan School Dean Glen Urban. "Steve brings an outstanding reputation for work in both corporate finance and financial engineering. He and Ken, a highly talented empirical economist and capital markets expert, ensure that Sloan's finance group is second to none."
Professor Ross, who will be the Franco Modigliani Professor of Finance and Economics, is best known as the inventor of the widely applied Arbitrage Pricing Theory, an approach to determining asset prices. He has co-authored three books on corporate finance and has published numerous articles in financial economics. He is also co-chairman of Roll and Ross Asset Management, which manages more than $3 billion in equity investments worldwide.
"Ross has changed the way Wall Street views academia," said Sloan Professor Andrew Lo. "People like Steve, Bob Merton and others raised the intellectual stakes in finance by applying beautiful and rigorous mathematical arguments with the goal of developing some extraordinarily practical applications."
Trained as a physicist at Caltech, Professor Ross earned the PhD in economics from Harvard. While an economist at Wharton, a seminar by Fischer Black, another former Sloan professor, piqued his interest in finance at a time when finance was not very respectable.
Professor French, who will join Sloan as the Nanyang Technological University Professor of Finance, is an authority on the behavior of security prices, investment strategies and the management of financial risk. His recent research focuses on tests of asset pricing models, the trade-off between risk and return in domestic and international financial markets, and investor diversification in international equity markets.
He is managing director of the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and past director of the Center for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 8, 1998.
