Kenneth French

Who is Kenneth French?

Kenneth Ronald "Ken" French is the Carl E. and Catherine M. Heidt Professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. He has previously been a faculty member at MIT, the Yale School of Management, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is most famous for his work on asset pricing with Eugene Fama. They wrote a series of papers, that cast doubt on the validity of the Capital Asset Pricing Model, which posits that a stock's beta alone should explain its average return. These papers describe two factors above and beyond a stock's market beta which can explain differences in stock returns: market capitalization and "value". They also offer evidence that a variety of patterns in average returns, often labeled as "anomalies" in past work, can be explained with their Fama-French three-factor model.