Richard Roll

About Richard Roll

Richard Roll (born October 31, 1939) is an American economist and professor of finance at CalTech, best known for his work on portfolio theory and asset pricing, both theoretical and empirical. He earned his bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from Auburn University in 1961, and his M.B.A. in 1963 at the University of Washington while working for Boeing in Seattle, Washington. In 1968, he received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in economics, finance, and statistics. His Ph.D. thesis, "The Behavior of Interest Rates: An Application of the Efficient Market Model to U.S. Treasury Bills," won the Irving Fisher Prize as the best American dissertation in economics in 1968. Roll co-authored the first event study that sought to analyze how stock prices respond to an event in 1969, using price data from the newly available CRSP database.