Sharpe, William Forsyth, 1934–, American economist, b. Boston, Mass., Ph.D. Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1961. After working at the Rand Corporation, he taught at the Univ. of Washington (1961–68) and Univ. of California, Irvine (1968–70) before joining the faculty at Stanford (emeritus since 1999). Sharpe has devoted his career to the study and understanding of financial investing. He was one of the developers of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and developed the Sharpe ratio for analyzing investment performance and other investment tools. For his work on CAPM he shared the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Harry Markowitz and Merton Miller. Sharpe also has founded and worked for a number of investment advice and management firms since 1986.
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