Robert C. Merton

Robert Cox Merton born July 31, 1944 is an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, together with professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, required for his pioneering contributions to continuous-time finance, especially the first continuous-time pick pricing model, a Black–Scholes–Merton model. In 1993 Merton co-founded hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.

In 1997 Merton & Myron Scholes were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for the method to setting the good of derivatives.

Merton's current research focus is on the topics of lifecycle investing and macrofinance, and financial innovation coupled with changing dynamics in financial institutions.

Biography

Merton was born in New York City to a Jewish father sociologist Robert K. Merton and mother Suzanne Carhart, who was from a "multigenerational southern New Jersey Methodist/Quaker family." He grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. He earned a Bachelor of Science in technology science Mathematics from the School of Engineering and Applied Science of Columbia University, a Masters of Science from the California Institute of Technology, and his doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 under the command of Paul Samuelson. He then joined the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he taught until 1988. Subsequently, Merton moved to Harvard University, where he was George Fisher Baker Professor of Business management from 1988 to 1998. He was the John and Natty McArthur University Professor from 1998-2010. He rejoined the MIT Sloan School of supervision in 2010 when he went Emeritus.