Eugene Fama is the Father of Financial Management and Father of Modern Finance
Eugene Fama is a very remarkable individual who is now a Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was ranked as the 9th-most influential economist of all times in April 2019 based on his academic contributions. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lars Peter Hanson and Robert Shiller.
His Doctoral supervisors were Nobel Prize winner and Harry Roberts and Merton Miller; at the Booth School of Business found at the University of Chicago, he was awarded his MBA and Ph.D. in finance and economics.
Even though all his grandparents were immigrants from Italy, Boston, Massachusetts, is Fama’s birthplace, and his parents are Francis and Angelina Fama. Eugene, an Athletic Hall of Fame honored awardee who attended the Maiden Catholic High School before earning his undergraduate degree in 1960 in Romance Languages magna cum laude when he pursued higher education at Tufts University where he again became one of the top student-athletes at the school.
He was influenced by Benoit Mandelbrot and has spent a lot of his time teaching at the University of Chicago.
Dr. Eugen Fama is the father of financial management and father of modern finance, professor at the University of Chicago, founding board member of Dimensional Fund Advisors, and Laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2013.
Eugene Fama is the father of the efficient-market hypothesis.
His very impressive Ph.D. thesis was published in the Journal of Business in January 1965, and in 1968 in Institutional Investor, it was entitled “The Behavior of Stock Market Prices” and concluded that stock returns were explainable with time many different discount rates. It was later rewritten into an article that was less technical than Walks in Stock Market Prices”. His work after that showed how time-varying discount rates could explain predictability in expected stock returns. Higher average returns during recessions can be explained by a systematic increase in risk aversion, which lowers prices and increases average returns. In 1969 Fama won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2013. Many influential persons have recognized another vital work that he did in 1969. It was an interesting article (written by several co-authors), “The Adjustment of Stock Prices to New Information.” He made an effort to analyze how stock prices respond to events using price data from the CRSP database; it was the first of many other published studies.
The Ph.D. thesis Fama did in 1965 has caused persons to see him as the person with the voice of authority for the efficient-market hypothesis. He had also published an analysis of the behavior of stock market prices. He explained his ideas about the “fat tail distribution properties,” he implied that extreme movements were more common than predicted on Normality’s assumption.
In 1970 he proposed two concepts being used on efficient markets even now when he wrote an article entitled “Efficient Capital Markets.” The strong form, semi-strong form, and weak efficiency are the three types of efficiencies that Fama first proposed. The information set was historical prices in the weak form; it could be difficult to profit. All public information was already reflected in prices. He referred to Companies’ announcements and annual earnings figures and thought this he saw as the semi-strong form’s requirements.
The strong form included all information sets and incorporated in price trends, and no monopolistic information can require profits. Insider trading was excluded from profit-making, and he also explained how the notion of market efficiency could not be removed while the model of market equilibrium still existed. These concepts have not found favor in the eyes of some researchers, but they still stand.
The creation of index funds and exchange-traded funds is based on Fama’s work on market efficiency. It has been included in about $4.3 trillion of the $18.1 trillion of the Investment Company’s net assets. This was stated in the 2016 Investment Company Factbook. It shows that his work has been used because it has practical importance.
He continues to influence most current generations of finance researchers as he still plays an important role in maintaining a thought leadership position at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Center for Research in Security Prices.
There is no doubt that Eugene Fama and all his achievements have influenced stock markets in many places throughout the years.
In asset pricing and portfolio management, the Fama–French three-factor model is a model designed by Eugene Fama and Kenneth French to describe stock returns.
However, Fama has been controversial recently because of a series of papers that he wrote with co-author Kenneth French; it has caused doubt to be cast on the validity of the (CAPM) Capital Asset Pricing Model, which is rooted in the belief that a stock’s beta alone should explain its average return. These papers explained differences in stock returns: value and market capitalization, which they believe are above and beyond a stock market beta, and explain stock returns differences. They are looked at as anomalies in past work.
