Kenneth French

Kenneth French received his PhD in finance from the University of Rochester and has been a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business since 1999, having previously taught at Chicago, Yale, and MIT. He is best known for his long-running collaboration with Eugene Fama — one of the most influential partnerships in empirical finance. Their 1992 paper "The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns" in the Journal of Finance introduced the Fama-French Three-Factor Model, which added size (small minus big, SMB) and value (high minus low book-to-market, HML) factors to the CAPM's single market factor. This model dramatically improved the empirical fit relative to the CAPM and is now the standard benchmark for evaluating mutual fund and hedge fund performance. In 2015, French and Fama extended the model to five factors, adding profitability (robust minus weak, RMW) and investment (conservative minus aggressive, CMA). The Fama-French five-factor model has become the de facto standard for academic and practitioner asset pricing. French also maintains an extensive online data library — the Fama-French Data Library — providing free access to factor returns and portfolios that is used by virtually every empirical asset pricing researcher globally. He serves as an academic director at Dimensional Fund Advisors, where factor-based investment strategies inspired by Fama-French research are implemented at institutional scale.