Stephen Ross (economist)

About Stephen Ross (economist)

Stephen Alan "Steve" Ross (February 3, 1944 – March 3, 2017) was the inaugural Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management after a long career as the Sterling Professor of Economics and Finance at the Yale School of Management. He is known for initiating several important theories and models in financial economics. He was a widely published author in finance and economics, and was a coauthor of a best-selling Corporate Finance textbook. He received his BS with honors from Caltech in 1965 where he majored in physics, and his PhD in economics from Harvard in 1970, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale School of Management, and MIT. Ross is best known for the development of the arbitrage pricing theory (mid-1970s) as well as for his role in developing the binomial options pricing model (1979; also known as the Cox–Ross–Rubinstein model). He was an initiator of the fundamental financial concept of risk-neutral pricing. In 1985 he contributed to the creation of the Cox–Ingersoll–Ross model for interest rate dynamics.