Stephen Alan Ross was born in Boston, Massachusetts on February 3, 1944. He received a bachelor's degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Before joining the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management faculty, he taught at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and at Yale University.

He was a seminal theorist whose worked for over three decades to reshape the field of financial economics. He was best known for developing what is called the arbitrage pricing theory. He also created the term agency theory and pioneered what is known as the binomial model for pricing stock options. He wrote more than 100 articles about finance and economics and was the co-author of the textbook Corporate Finance. He received numerous awards including the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize from the Toulouse School of Economics in 2007 and the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics in 2015. He died from sudden cardiac arrest on March 3, 2017 at the age of 73.

(Bowker Author Biography)