Rate My Professor Eugene Fama

Eugene F. Fama is the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance in the Business & Economics faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, with an affiliation to the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. He earned a BA from Tufts University in 1960, an MBA in 1963, and a PhD in 1964 from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (now Chicago Booth), where his dissertation was titled "The Behavior of Stock Market Prices." Fama joined the Booth faculty as an Assistant Professor of Finance in 1963, advancing to Associate Professor from 1966 to 1968, Professor from 1968 to 1973, Theodore O. Yntema Professor from 1973 to 1984, Theodore O. Yntema Distinguished Service Professor from 1984 to 1993, and his current distinguished professorship since 1993. He served as a Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven and the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management in Belgium in 1975–1976 and at the Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA, during winter quarters from 1982 to 1995. Fama chairs the Center for Research in Security Prices at Chicago Booth, founded 40 years ago to provide tools for securities data analysis, and has been on the Board of Directors and Investment Strategy Committee of Dimensional Fund Advisors since 1982. He also serves as an advisory editor of the Journal of Financial Economics.

Fama's research specializations include the efficient markets hypothesis, the relation between risk and expected return and its implications for portfolio management, asset pricing, corporate finance, and price formation in capital markets. He coined the terms "market efficiency" and "efficient markets" in his seminal 1965 paper "Random Walks in Stock Market Prices." Key publications include "The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns" (1992, with Kenneth R. French), which won the Smith-Breeden Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Finance; "Market Efficiency, Long-Term Returns, and Behavioral Finance" (2000), recipient of the Fama-DFA Prize; "Two Pillars of Asset Pricing" (2014) in the American Economic Review; and "My Life in Finance" (2011) in the Annual Review of Financial Economics. A prolific scholar, he has authored two books and more than 100 articles in academic journals. Fama received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Lars Peter Hansen and Robert J. Shiller, for empirical analysis of asset prices. He was the first recipient of the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics (2005), Morgan Stanley American Finance Association Award for Excellence in Finance (2007), and Onassis Prize in Finance (2009). Additional honors include the Chaire Francqui (1982), Nicholas Molodovsky Award from the CFA Institute (2006), fellowships in the American Finance Association (first elected, 2001), Econometric Society, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and several honorary doctorates. Recognized as the father of modern finance, Fama's work has transformed finance theory and practice, making him one of the most cited researchers in economics.