Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) and the American Finance Association (AFA) announced today that Harvard Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus Michael C. Jensen is the recipient of the Morgan Stanley-AFA 2009 Award For Excellence in Financial Economics and will donate the $200,000 cash grant he has received as part of the award to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Harvard Business School and the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester.
The National Bureau of Economic Research will receive $150,000 of the grant to fund a program to examine the role for ethics in business. Harvard Business School and the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester will each receive $25,000.
"We are delighted to announce the selection of Mike Jensen as the winner of this year's Morgan Stanley-AFA Award. The impact of Mike's work has been extraordinarily powerful and far-reaching," said Joseph Langsam, Managing Director and Global Head of Market Modeling in IDEAS at Morgan Stanley. "Mike's intense passion for ideas, and his insistence on confronting elegant theories with the often messy realities of the outside world, have made him an inspiration to many of us."
Professor Jensen is one of the most cited scholars in the social sciences and has produced more than 100 scientific papers in addition to hundreds of articles on economics, finance and business-related topics. Additionally, he co-founded the Journal of Financial Economics, one of the top scientific journals in financial economics and the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), rated number 1 of 400 worldwide open source repositories for scholarly research.
"Over the past forty-plus years, Michael Jensen has been one of the most compelling, provocative, and influential scholars in any area of the social sciences - as well as one of the most highly cited," said Head of the AFA Selection Committee Jeremy Stein. "His research on agency theory, organizational design and incentives has helped to define the modern paradigm for how both academics and practitioners think about many of the most fundamental issues in corporate finance, corporate governance, and law and economics, to name just a few of the fields that have been shaped by his thinking,"
Morgan Stanley will host a presentation ceremony at its headquarters in New York in honor of Professor Jensen's award and accomplishments.
Morgan Stanley is a leading global financial services firm providing a wide range of investment banking, securities, investment management and wealth management services. The Firm's employees serve clients worldwide including corporations, governments, institutions and individuals from more than 1,200 offices in 36 countries. For further information about Morgan Stanley, please visit www.morganstanley.com.
The American Finance Association is the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics. Founded in 1940, the AFA now has more than 10,000 members and publishes the world-renowned Journal of Finance. For further information about the AFA, please visit www.afajof.org.
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