Great Moments in Financial Economics - 水木社区归档站.docVIP

Great Moments in Financial Economics: I. Present Value Mark Rubinstein November 12, 2002 [version appeared in Journal of Investment Management (first quarter 2003)] Ideas are seldom born fully clothed, but are rather dressed by a slow and arduous process of accretion. In the study of many fields, to achieve deep knowledge of the current state-of-the-art, it is necessary to appreciate how its ideas have evolved – What are their origins? By what paths of thought are they elaborated? How does one idea lead to others? Why was there once confusion about ideas that now seem obvious? Such an understanding has a special significance in the social sciences. In the humanities, there is little sense of chronological progress. For example, who would argue that, in the last three centuries, English poetry or drama has been written that surpasses the works of Shakespeare? In the natural sciences, knowledge accumulates by largely uncovering pre-existing and permanent natural processes; whereas knowledge in the social sciences can affect the social evolution that follows its discovery, which in turn largely determines the succeeding social theory. In this spirit, this article and its successors that are to appear in subsequent issues of this Journal, provide a history of aspects of the theory of financial economics, emphasizing the earliest foundation-setting contributions. It is not, however, a history of the practice of finance, and only occasionally refers to the large real world outside of theoretical finance. Nonetheless, the “history of financial economics” is construed quite broadly to include the historical development of methodological and theoretical tools used to create this theory, including economics and mathematics. Of necessity, I have selected only a small, but I hope the most important, portion of the full body of research that is available on each subject. Some papers are significant because they plant a seed, ask what turns out to be the right questio