Richard Posner

Text IV.

Robert Cox Merton (born July 31, 1944), is a leading scholar in the field of finance and was one of three men who, in the early 1970s, developed the mathematics of financial options.

Robert C. Merton

Text III.

Merton was born in New York, New York and received his Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Mathematics from the School of Engineering and Applied Science of Columbia University.

Currently, Merton is a professor at the Harvard Business School; he also holds the rank of University Professor, which is the highest professorial rank at Harvard University.

Merton is also the son of Robert K. Merton, an outstanding sociologist at Columbia University.

Merton resides in both Cambridge, MA and New York, NY. He has three children.

Merton studied the options pricing model. He then applied optimal control theory in order to derive consumption and portfolio allocation. His work paved the way for the now flourishing field of financial engineering, and quantitative finance which applies his methods to calculate prices for exotic derivatives with arbitrary payoffs.

In 1969 Merton published groundbreaking work on a dilemma that all investors face. Merton's portfolio problem enables people to decide how much of their income they can consume now and of the rest income, how much of it should be allocated between stocks and bonds to maximize the usefulness of that income.

In 1970 Merton introduced a structural credit risk model. The 'Merton Model' refers to a model that treats equity as an option on the firm's assets. The reduced form default probabilities that stem from Merton's insights were introduced commercially by Kamakura Corporation, where Robert Jarrow is director of research, in 2002.

In 1973 Merton introduced the Intertemporal Capital Asset Pricing Model known as ICAPM. ICAPM incorporates explicit hedges that investors make to protect themselves from savings shortfalls or changes in the investment opportunity set.

In 1999 Merton got the lifetime achievement award in mathematical finance.

In 2002 Merton threw himself into the public controversy over how corporations ought to account for the stock options they often award as parts of a compensation package.

In 2005 the Baker Library at Harvard University opened The Merton Exhibit to honor his lifelong achievements and inspire students to pursue academic careers.

Richard Allen Posner (born January 11, 1939, in New York City) is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He is one of the most influential legal theorists and a major voice in the law and economics movement, which he helped start while a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He currently serves as a lecturer at the Law School. Judge Posner is the greatest American jurist who never served on the Supreme Court.

Posner is the author of nearly 40 books on jurisprudence, legal philosophy, and several other topics, such as The Problems of Jurisprudence; Sex and Reason; Overcoming Law; Law, Pragmatism and Democracy; and The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory.

Posner graduated from Yale College and from Harvard Law School, where he was first in his class and president of the Harvard Law Review. In 1969, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains a senior lecturer and where his son Eric Posner is Professor. He was an editor of the Journal of Legal Studies in 1972. President Ronald Reagan appointed Posner to the Seventh Circuit in 1981. He served as Chief Judge of that court from 1993 to 2000.

Posner is an unusual combination of a pragmatist in philosophy, a classical liberal in politics, and an economist in legal methodology. A 2004 poll by Legal Affairs magazine named Posner as one of the top twenty legal thinkers in the U.S He is a prolific author of articles and books on a wide range of topics which include the 2000 presidential election recount controversy, President Bill Clinton's scandalous affair with Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment procedure, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His analysis of the Lewinsky scandal cut across most party and ideological divisions. Posner's greatest influence is through his writings on law and economics— The New York Times called him "one of the most important antitrust scholars of the past half-century." In December 2004, Posner started a joint blog with Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker.

He famously opposed the right of privacy in 1981. He argued that the kinds of interests protected under privacy are not distinctive. He contended that privacy is protected in ways that are economically inefficient.

He wrote several opinions sympathetic to abortion rights, including a decision holding "partial-birth abortion" constitutionally protected in some circumstances.

He wrote favorably of efficient breach of contracts. Breach often leads to a worse result for society: if a seller breaches a contract to deliver building materials, the buyer's workers might go idle while the buyer looks for a replacement.

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