After 15 years of sharing the credit for groundbreaking research with Ken French, Eugene Fama is on a mission to expose his former colleague, and himself. The result is an alarming behind-the-scenes look at how academic careers are made and broken.
"I hired Ken French in 1990 when he was a driving instructor in Winnetka. Chicago was pressuring me to partner with another researcher; I couldn't stand the idea so I hired a stooge. The man has never contributed a single idea to my research, and yet his name is constantly mentioned in the same breath as mine. On top of it all, the American Finance Association has nominated him as president-elect! That's a travesty and I won't have it."
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The rest of the article. I got the link via Greg Mankiw's blog. By the way, this is far better than Mankiw's own April Fool's moment, which was a good one already :-). If you know anything about Economics and Finance, you must agree that this one here is a candidate for the absolutely perfect joke within the Economics academe :-).
And now, to get to more serious things :-), since I bet on a John Bates Clark winner for this year and... I lost (though I am not at all dissapointed!), I also already bet on Eugene Fama being one of the Nobel Prize Laureates in Economics (well, to be completely correct: "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics in the Memory of Alfred Nobel" Laureates) this year (possibly together with Michael Jensen and/or Kenneth French). I think this year could well be Corporate Finance's turn to get the attention of the Nobel committee...
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