Kenneth French

Kenneth French is a finance professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and a principal at Dimensional Fund Advisors. He is best known as co-developer with Eugene Fama of the three-factor model (market, size, value) and the subsequent five-factor model adding profitability and investment factors. The Fama-French models became the dominant framework in academic asset pricing and the intellectual foundation for factor investing firms like DFA and AQR. French maintains a publicly-available data library of factor returns that is widely used in academic and practical research. His ongoing collaboration with Fama has produced decades of empirical research on market efficiency, return predictability, and the cross-section of expected returns. French has also written on the costs of active management, demonstrating that the aggregate of active mutual fund returns must, before costs, equal market returns — work that strengthened the intellectual case for passive investing at scale.