Nobel Laureate William F. Sharpe Presents WSU Brinson Lecture April 21

PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University will welcome Nobel Laureate William F. Sharpe to campus on April 21 to present the 2006 Gary P. Brinson Distinguished Lecture in Finance. His presentation, “Equilibrium Simulation”, will begin at 3 p.m. in Todd Hall Room 276. The public is invited.

“WSU is truly honored to welcome Bill Sharpe as this year’s Brinson Speaker,” said Rick Sias, professor of Finance and the Gary P. Brinson chair of Investment Management. “Dr. Sharpe is widely considered one of the ‘founding fathers’ of modern portfolio theory; his work has fundamentally changed the way money is managed today.”

The STANCO 25  Professor of Finance, Emeritus at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Sharpe is the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1970, having previously taught at the University of Washington and the University of California at Irvine.

Among his many accomplishments, his work on the Capital Asset Pricing Model is perhaps the most widely known. The model demonstrates that the expected return for a stock should not depend on the total risk of the stock, but rather the stock’s contribution to the total risk of a portfolio. In addition, his risk-adjusted return measure, the “Sharpe Ratio” is widely used in practice from mutual funds to pension funds.

In 1996, Sharpe co-founded Financial Engines, a firm that provides online investment advice and management for individuals, and currently serves on its’ board.

Sharpe is the past president of the American Finance Association and has authored six books as well as numerous articles published in professional journals.

The Brinson lecture series is sponsored by gifts from Gary P. Brinson, a WSU master of business administration alumnus. He is the founder and retired chairman of Brinson Partners, Inc., and is a nationally-recognized authority on global investing. In 1999, he received the Award for Professional Excellence from the Association for Investment Management Research. After his retirement in 2000, the Brinson family created The Brinson Foundation, a philanthropic organization.

Sharpe is the fifth person to present the Brinson Lecture. The first was presented in April 2002 by Robert J. Shiller, Yale economist and author of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller, “Irrational Exuberance.” In 2003, the Brinson Lecture was presented by Nobel Laureate Myron S. Scholes, an academician, businessperson and author who co-developed in 1973 the Black-Scholes Formula for the valuation of stock options, an important mechanism for managing risk in financial markets. Following him in 2004 was John C. Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, Inc. and president of the Bogle Financial Markets Research Center. Last year, the College welcomed Nobel Laureate Harry Markowitz, who is often referred to as the father of modern portfolio theory.