Michael Jensen

This article is about the economist Michael Jensen. For the politician see Michael Aastrup Jensen .

Michael Cole "Mike" Jensen (born November 30, 1939 in Rochester , Minnesota ) is an American economist . His research area and field of work is mainly finance . He is currently managing director of the consulting firm Monitor Group and also emeritus at Harvard University .

Life

Michael Jensen was born on November 30, 1939 in Rochester, Minnesota. In 1962 he was awarded the American Artium Baccalaureus (AB) as the first academic degree from Macalester College , where celebrities such as Kofi Annan and the former US Vice President Walter Mondale have studied. In 1964 he received MBA from the University of Chicago issued four years later received his doctorate Jensen for Ph.D. , also at the University of Chicago. From 1967 to 1988 Jensen was a professor at the University of Rochester , 1977 to 1988 founder and chairman of the Managerial Economics Research Center at the University of Rochester and 1985 to 2000 professor at Harvard Business School . After the end of his active professorship at Harvard Business School in 2000, he became an employee of the consulting firm Monitor Group, which he currently heads as managing director.

Jensen is also a member of various committees and councils such as the American Finance Association, the European Corporate Governance Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1992, he founded the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) with Wayne Marr , an open access document server for the humanities, humanities and social sciences. In 2016 it was taken over by Elsevier. As the founder and author of the Journal of Financial Economics , Jensen is also a journalist. The Jensen Prize has been awarded annually in his name since 1997.

Research priorities

Michael Jensen's most famous work was written in 1976 with William H. Meckling. In the essay A Theory of the firm. On the basis of the work of Ronald Coase , he justifies the theory known today as the principal-agent or agency theory, managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure . It offers a model to explain the actions of people in a hierarchy , but also makes general statements about the design of contracts . The principal-agent theory is one of the leading explanatory approaches that are discussed and applied in economics today, alongside the transaction cost theory , the theory of rights of disposal and the resource theory .

Jensen's recommendation, published in 1990, not to reward highly paid employees of public companies with extremely high salaries, but to offer them stock options, also helped Jensen gain international fame . So " the top managers should have to earn their money in the literal sense ", since the share blocks only gain in value if the price rises significantly.

With William H. Meckling (1994) it has the basic concept of the R esourceful- E valuative- M aximizing M developed odel (REMM) which close relations to the design of the RREEMM of Siegwart Lindenberg has.

Since 2017, Clarivate Analytics Jensen has been one of the favorites for an Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics ( Clarivate Citation Laureates , formerly Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates ) due to the number of its citations .

Selected publications

• The Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period 1945–1964. In: Journal of Finance. Volume 23, No. 2, 1967, pp. 389-416, ISSN  1540-6261 .
• (with William H. Meckling) Theory of the Firm. Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure. In: Journal of Financial Economics. Vol. 3, No. 4, 1976, pp. 305-360, ISSN  0304-405X .
• Can the Corporation Survive? In: Financial Analysts Journal. Volume 31, No. 1, 1978, pp. 31-37, ISSN  0015-198X .
• The Modern Theory of Corporate Finance. McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1984,
• CEO Incentives: Its Not How Much You Pay, But How. In: Harvard Business Review. 1990, pp. 138-153, ISSN  0017-8012 .
• with William H. Meckling: The Nature of Man. In: Journal of Applied Corporate Finance. Volume 7, No. 2, pp. 4-19, summer 1994, doi: 10.2139 / ssrn.5471 .
• Foundations of Organizational Strategy. Harvard University Press, 1998.
• A Theory of the Firm. Governance, Residual Claims, and Organizational Forms. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. [u. a.] 2000, ISBN 0-674-00295-4 .
• Morale Markets. The Critical Role of Values ​​in the Economy. Princeton University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-691-13522-9 .

Web links

• Website about Michael Jensen at Harvard University (English)
• Biography of Michael Jensen on the Harvard Business School website
• Entry at IDEAS

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ABOUT SSRN: From The Desk of Michael C. Jensen, Chairman , ssrn.com, accessed on May 9, 2017.
2. ^ Robert Cookson: Elsevier buys research sharing website. In: Financial Times . 17th May 2016.
3. ↑ Richard Van Noorden: Social-sciences preprint server snapped up by publishing giant Elsevier , nature.com, May 17, 2016.
4. ^ JFE website
5. ↑ Michael C. Jensen, William H. Meckling: Theory of the Firm. Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure. ( papers.ssrn.com )
6. ↑ See: Kevin J. Murphy, Michael C. Jensen: CEO Incentives: It's Not How Much You Pay, But How. In: Harvard Business Review. 1990.
7. ↑ Andras Oldag: Compulsion to be modest  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung Online. August 26, 2003  
8. ↑ Jürgen Schönstein: With tricks by the billions. In: Focus Online. December 29, 2006.
9. ↑ The 2017 Clarivate Citation Laureates - Clarivate. (No longer available online.) In: clarivate.com. Archived from the original on September 20, 2017 ; accessed on September 21, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.