Michael C. Jensen

About Michael C. Jensen

Michael Cole Jensen (November 30, 1939 – April 2, 2024) was an American economist who worked in the field of financial economics. From 1967 to 1988, he was on the University of Rochester's faculty. Between 2000 and 2009 he worked for the Monitor Company Group, a strategy-consulting firm which became "Monitor Deloitte" in 2013. Until 2000, he held the position of Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University. Jensen died in Sarasota, Florida on April 2, 2024, at the age of 84. He was one of the most influential financial economists of all time. Jensen made three major contributions, each of which have had large impacts. First, his body of work has been widely recognized, making him one of the most-cited economists of all time, with over 340,000 citations on Google Scholar as of April 2024, according to the Promarket tribute. Much of his work focused on agency problems within organizations, especially publicly traded corporations. Second, Jensen was also the co-founder and editor for many years of the Journal of Financial Economics. The journal became the top academic finance journal almost immediately after its founding.