Michael C. Jensen

Jensen joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School in 1985. He became Emeritus in 1999 when he joined The Monitor Company as Managing Director of the Organizational Strategy Practice. He was LaClare Professor of Finance and Business Administration at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Rochester, from 1984-1988, Professor from 1979-1984, Associate Professor from 1971-1979, and Assistant Professor from 1967-1971. He founded the Managerial Economics Research Center at the University of Rochester in 1977 and served as its Director until 1988.

Professor Jensen earned his Ph.D. in Economics, Finance, and Accounting and his M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Chicago and an A.B. degree from Macalester College. He was awarded the honorary degree, Docteur Honoris Causa, by Universite Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, July, 1991 as well as by the University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, December 2000. In June of 2001, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY. In the fall of 2001 he was appointed Visiting Scholar at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

Professor Jensen is the author of more than 50 published papers, as well as comments and articles on a wide range of economic, finance and business-related topics in scholarly journals, books, and the popular and business press. He is author of Foundations of Organizational Strategy (Harvard University Press, 1998), and Theory of the Firm: Governance, Residual Claims, and Organizational Forms (Harvard University Press, 2000). He is editor of The Modern Theory of Corporate Finance (with Clifford W. Smith, Jr., McGraw-Hill, 1984) and Studies in the Theory of Capital Markets (Praeger Publishers, 1972). He founded the Journal of Financial Economics, one of the top two scientific journals in financial economics, in 1973, served as Managing Editor of that journal before becoming the Founding Editor in 1997. From 1992 through 1998 he served on the steering committee of the Mind Brain Behavior Initiative at Harvard University (a Harvard interfaculty effort to bring together a wide range of scholars interested in understanding the limitations of the human brain and its role in generating counter-productive human behavior). In 1994 he co-founded and is Chairman of Social Science Electronic Publishing, Inc. which is devoted to the electronic publication of scientific work (http://ssrn.com).

Dr. Jensen was elected a Fellow of the American Finance Association in 2002 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. In 1990, he was named "Scholar of the Year" by the Eastern Finance Association and one of the "Year's 25 Most Fascinating Business People" by Fortune magazine. He received a 1989 McKinsey Award for his paper "Eclipse of the Public Corporation," and was awarded the Joseph Coolidge Shaw, S.J. Medal by Boston College in 1984. Dr. Jensen was also awarded (with William Meckling) the Graham and Dodd Plaque given by the Financial Analysts Federation in May, 1979 for their paper "Can the Corporation Survive?" Dr. Jensen and his co-author, William Meckling, received the first Leo Melamed Prize for outstanding scholarship by business school teachers from the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business in March, 1979 for their paper, "Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Ownership Structure." In 1984, this paper was identified as one of the most cited items in its field and named a Citation Classic by the Institute for Scientific Information.