About the Author

Zvi Bodie

Zvi Bodie is Professor Emeritus at Boston University, where he taught from 1973 to 2016.  Today, he is an independent financial consultant and educator.  His main professional interest is to firmly establish finance as an applied science built on the principles explained in his books and websites.  He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has served on the finance faculty at the Harvard Business School and MIT's Sloan School of Management.  His textbook Financial Economics coauthored by Nobel-Prize winning economist Robert C. Merton has been translated into 9 languages.  In addition to his textbooks, Bodie has coauthored two books for the mass market: Risk Less and Prosper: Your Guide to Safer Investing and Worry-Free Investing A Safe Approach to Achieving Your Lifetime Financial Goals.  In 2007, the Retirement Income Industry Association gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award for applied research.  He has authored and edited many books and articles on pensions and investing for retirement. With the support of the Research Foundation of the CFA Institute, he organized a series of 3 conferences on the theory and practice of life-cycle finance.  Currently he serves as senior advisor to the Investments and Wealth Institute and consults for a number of financial firms including Dimensional Fund Advisors. 

Alex Kane

Professor of finance and economics at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He has been visiting professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo; Graduate School of Business, Harvard; Kennedy School of Government, Harvard; and research associate, National Bureau of Economic Research. An author of many articles in finance and management journals, Professor Kane’s research is mainly in corporate finance, portfolio management, and capital markets, most recently in the measurement of market volatility and pricing of options.

Alan Marcus

Alan J. Marcus is a Professor of Finance in the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management at Boston College. His main research interests are in derivatives and securities markets. He is co-author (with Zvi Bodie and Alex Kane) of the texts Investments and Essentials of Investments. Professor Marcus has served as a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Marcus also spent two years at Freddie Mac, where he helped to develop mortgage pricing and credit risk models. He currently serves on the Research Foundation Advisory Board of the CFA Institute.