Professor
Harvard Business School
Robert C. Merton is currently the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at the Harvard Business School. Prior to joining the faculty of Harvard in 1988, he served on the finance faculty of MIT's Sloan School of Management for eighteen years. He currently serves as Chief Science Officer of Trinsum Group, an advisory firm which provides strategic consulting, corporate finance investment banking advice, asset management, and pension solution systems. He is a past President of the American Finance Association and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Professor Merton received the 1997 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (with Myron Scholes) for a new method to determine the value of derivatives.
Dr. Merton’s research focuses on developing finance theory in the fields of capital markets and financial institutions. He has written extensively on intertemporal portfolio choice, capital asset pricing, pricing of options, credit risk, corporate debt, loan guarantees, and other complex derivative securities. He has also written on the operation and regulation of financial institutions, including issues of capital budgeting, production, hedging and risk management. His book, Continuous-Time Finance, was first published by Basil Blackwell, Inc. in 1990, with a revised edition issued in 1992. He is co-author of Cases in Financial Engineering: Applied Studies of Financial Innovation (Prentice- Hall 1995), The Global Financial System: A Functional Perspective (Harvard Business School Press 1995), and Finance (Prentice-Hall 2000).
Professor Merton has also been recognized for translating finance science into practice. In 1993, he received the inaugural Financial Engineer of the Year Award from the International Association of Financial Engineers, which elected him a Senior Fellow the following year. Derivatives Strategy magazine named him to its Derivatives Hall of Fame in 1998. In 2002, Risk magazine named him to its Risk Hall of Fame and in 2003, presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to the field of risk management. A Distinguished Fellow of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance ('Q Group'), Professor Merton received the Nicholas Molodovsky Award from the Association of Investment Management and Research in 2003. From 1988-1992, he served as a senior advisor to Office of the Chairman, Salomon Inc. In 1993, he cofounded Long-Term Capital Management and served as a principal until 1999. From 1999-2001, he was a senior advisor to J.P. Morgan & Co. Incorporated.
Professor Merton received a B.S. in Engineering Mathematics from Columbia University, a M.S. in Applied Mathematics from California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He holds honorary degrees from University of Chicago and seven foreign universities
