February 2, 2001 : Prof. Dr. Hans Gerber

Ecole des HEC University of Lausanne, Switzerland Doctor Honoris Causa

May 5, 1998: Prof. Dr. Myron Scholes

After finishing his undergraduate studies at McMaster University in 1962, Myron Scholes started his graduate studies at the University of Chicago. There, he secured a junior computer-programming position at the school, where he assisted several professors, including Merton Miller and Eugene Fama, on their research projects. Merton Miller encouraged him to enter the Ph.D. program, which he successfully finished in 1968 with a thesis on the determinants of the shape of the demand curve for traded securities. In the fall of 1968, Myron Scholes became an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he met Fisher Black, at that time a consultant working for Arthur D. Little in Cambridge. In 1969, Robert Merton joined the faculty at Sloan School. They were all three highly interested in asset pricing and derivative pricing models, resulting in the development of contingent claims pricing. After being visiting professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago in 1973-1974, Myron Scholes decided to return to it. During the following years, he worked on the effects of taxation on asset prices and incentives. Also, he became highly involved with the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) at the University of Chicago. In 1981, he joined the Business School and Law School at Stanford University, partly resulting in a shift in interests towards pension planning, investment banking and incentives. As of 1990, Myron Scholes became a consultant to Salomon Brothers, Inc., which soon thereafter resulted in his appointment as managing director and co-head of its fixed-income-derivative sales and trading group. Together with collegeagues at Stanford and Salomon Brothers, he founded the firm Long-Term Capital Management. In 1997, Myron Scholes won the Nobel Prize in Econonomic Sciences.

January 14, 1997: Dr. Alan Greenspan

In 1977, Alan Greenspan obtained a Ph.D. in economics from New York University. From 1954 to 1974 and from 1977 to 1987, Alan Greenspan was Chairman and President of Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc., a consulting firm in New York City. From 1974 to 1977 he was Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers under President Ford and from 1981 to 1983 as Chairman of the National Commission on Social Security Reform. Alan Greenspan has also served as a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, a member of Time magazine's Board of Economists, a senior adviser to the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, and a consultant to the Congressional Budget Office. In recent years, Alan Greenspan has served as a Director in many corporations (including Alcoa, General Foods, J.P. Morgan, Mobil and others) and has fulfilled several non-corporate positions (including Member of the Board of Trustees of The Rand Corporation, Director of the Institute for International Economics, Member of the Board of Overseers at Hoover Institution (Stanford University)). Since August 11, 1987, Alan Greenspan serves as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

February 2, 1995: Prof. Dr. Eugene Fama

While being an undergraduate student at Tufts University, Eugene Fama also worked at a stock market newsletter firm, where he was charged with finding "buy” and “sell” signals. There, he experienced that investment schemes based on patterns in stock prices worked well when applied to the past, but that they failed when tested in real time. That puzzle, plus the skills that he acquired evaluating stock market data influenced Gene Fama to obtain a Ph.D. in Finance. After earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago, he joined the faculty there in 1963. In 1965, his entire doctoral thesis "The Behavior of Stock Market Prices" was published in the Journal of Business and summarized nine months later by the Financial Analysts Journal. Fama's Efficient Market Theory explains the workings of free and efficient financial markets. It is based on the assumptions of widely and cheaply available information which leads to all known and available information being readily reflected in current stock prices. Therefore, the price of a stock agreed on by a buyer and a seller is the best estimate of the investment value of that stock and it will almost instantaneously change as new unpredictable information about it appears in the market.

October 5, 1994: Prof. Dr. Ray Ball

Dr. Ray Ball studied Accounting at the University of NSW (Australia) and graduated MBA and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. Dr. Ball is Sidney Davidson Professor of Business in the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. He is also editor of the Journal of Accounting Research, and Professor in the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management. He is a Fellow and CPA of the Australian Society of Certified Practising Accountants and a member of the Securities Institute of Australia. Professor Ball is one of the world’s leading experts on the effect of earnings announcements on stock prices. His research with Philip Brown on the relationship between earnings and stock prices received the American Accounting Association's inaugural award for Seminal Contributions to the Accounting Literature.

May 5, 1986: Prof. Dr. Merton Miller

Merton Miller’s academic career started at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1943. After graduating, he worked for some time as an economist in the Division of Tax Research of the U.S. Treasury Department and in the Division of Research and Statistics of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In 1949, Merton Miller started his doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, from which he earned his Ph.D. in 1952. In 1952-1953, Merton Miller was Visiting Assistant Lecturer at the London School of Economics. The following year, he joined Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, where he taught economic history. At Carnegie Tech, Merton Miller first encountered Franco Modigliani, with whom he wrote several papers on corporate finance (1958, 1961, 1963). The product of their collaboration, which was quickly dubbed the “M&M theorem,” is still widely discussed and argued among (financial) economists. In 1961, Merton Miller was appointed at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He was visiting professor at K.U. Leuven during 1966-1967. In the early 1980's, he became a public director of the Chicago Board of Trade and, later on, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. After Franco Modigliani in 1985, Merton Miller won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990.