I've mentioned Professor Fama quite a few times, usually in proximity to his co-conspirator Kenneth French who is now at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. From their work on asset pricing to their observations at Dimensional Fund Advisors' Fama - French Forum.
To February 2020:
Feb. 25
Regarding the Efficient Market Hypothesis....
On days like today you might find Eugene Fama in some Chicago watering hole with his designated driver, Kenneth French. As we noted in another context ["Is semi-variance a more useful measure of downside risk than standard deviation?"]:
...If yous see them together at some Chicago dive bar, Fama is the one with the Nobel around his neck, French the one saying "For Chrissakes Gene."
to most recently, May 14's Investing In Companies - Factors: "What Is Quality?".
Here's Eugene Fama via Dimensional Fund Advisors, March 10, 2010:
Foreword
I was invited by the editors to contribute a professional autobiography for the Annual Review of Financial Economics. I focus on what I think is my best stuff. Readers interested in the rest can download my vita from the website of the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. I only briefly discuss ideas and their origins, to give the flavor of context and motivation. I do not attempt to review the contributions of others, which is likely to raise feathers. Mea culpa in advance.
Finance is the most successful branch of economics in terms of theory and empirical work, the interplay between the two, and the penetration of financial research into other areas of economics and real-world applications. I have been doing research in finance almost since its start, when Markowitz (1952, 1959) and Modigliani and Miller (1958) set the field on the path to become a serious scientific discipline. It has been fun to see it all, to contribute, and to be a friend and colleague to the giants who created the field.
Origins
My grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Sicily in the early 1900s, so I am a third generation Italian-American. I was the first in the lineage to go to university.
My passion in high school was sports. I played basketball (poorly), ran track (second in the state meet in the high jump — not bad for a 5’8” kid), played football (class B state champions), and baseball (state semi-finals two years). I claim to be the inventor of the split end position in football, an innovation prompted by the beatings I took trying to block much bigger defensive tackles. I am in my high school’s (Malden Catholic) athletic hall of fame.
I went on to Tufts University in 1956, intending to become a high school teacher and sports coach. At the end of my second year, I married my high school sweetheart, Sallyann Dimeco, now my wife of more than 50 years. We have four adult children and ten delightful grandchildren. Sally’s family contributions dwarf mine.
At Tufts I started in romance languages but after two years became bored with rehashing Voltaire and took an economics course. I was enthralled by the subject matter and by the prospect of escaping lifetime starvation on the wages of a high school teacher. In my last two years at Tufts, I went heavy on economics. The professors, as teachers, were as inspiring as the research stars I later profited from at the University of Chicago.
My professors at Tufts encouraged me to go to graduate school. I leaned toward a business school Ph.D. My Tufts professors (mostly Harvard economics Ph.D.s) pushed Chicago as the business school with a bent toward serious economics. I was accepted at other schools, but April 1960 came along and I didn’t hear from Chicago. I called and the dean of students, Jeff Metcalf, answered. (The school was much smaller then.) They had no record of my application. But Jeff and I hit it off, and he asked about my grades. He said Chicago had a scholarship reserved for a qualified Tufts graduate. He asked if I wanted it. I accepted and, except for two great years teaching in Belgium, I have been at the University of Chicago since 1960. I wonder what path my professional life would have taken if Jeff didn’t answer the phone that day. Serendipity!
During my last year at Tufts, I worked for Harry Ernst, an economics professor who also ran a stock market forecasting service. Part of my job was to invent schemes to forecast the market. The schemes always worked on the data used to design them. But Harry was a good statistician, and he insisted on out-of-sample tests. My schemes invariably failed those tests. I didn’t fully appreciate the lesson in this at the time, but it came to me later.....
....MUCH MORE
