Michael Jensen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Michael C. Jensen | |
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| Born | November 30, 1939 Rochester, Minnesota, U.S.A. |
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| Residence | U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Economics |
| Institutions | Monitor Group 2000- Harvard University 1985-00 University of Rochester 1967-88 |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Doctoral advisor | Merton Miller |
| Known for | Financial economics Corporate finance |
Michael Cole "Mike" Jensen (born November 30, 1939) is an American economist working in the area of financial economics. He is currently the managing director in charge of organizational strategy at Monitor Group, a strategy consulting firm, and the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus at Harvard University.
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[edit] Biography
Michael Jensen[1] was born on November 30, 1939 in Rochester, Minnesota, United States. He received his A.B. in Economics from Macalester College in 1962. He received both his M.B.A. (1964) and Ph.D. (1968) degrees from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, notably working with Professor Merton Miller (1990 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics).
Between 1967-1988, Jensen[2] was a professor of finance and business administration at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration of the University of Rochester. He also founded and managed between 1977-88 the Managerial Economics Research Center at the University of Rochester. Since 1985, Michael Jensen also joined the Harvard Business School, keeping a double appointement until 1988, when he left the University of Rochester remaining only at Harvard. In 2000 Jensen retired from academic work, remaining a Professor Emeritus at Harvard, and joined the consulting firm Monitor Group.
He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Bern (1976), Harvard University (1984-85, before joining the faculty) and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (2001-02). In 1992 he held the chair of president of the American Finance Association, he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and, since 2002, he is a board member of the European Corporate Governance Institute. Jensen is also the founder and editor of the Journal of Financial Economics.
The Jensen Prize in corporate finance and organizations research is named in his honor.
[edit] Research
Prof. Jensen has played an important role in the academic discussion of the capital asset pricing model, of stock options policy, and of corporate governance, developing a method of measuring fund manager performance, the so-called Jensen's alpha.
Jensen's best-known work is the 1976 paper he co-authored with William H. Meckling, "Theory of the firm: Managerial behaviour, agency costs and ownership structure," one of the most widely-cited economics papers of the last 30 years. Besides reigniting interest in theory of the firm (a field pioneered by Ronald Coase), the paper's argument that managers' interests are different from those of shareholders laid the foundation for the widespread use of stock options as executive compensation tools.
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ Author page at ISI
- ^ CV on his Harvard Business School page
[edit] External links
- Personal page at the Harvard Business School website
