47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning, Imaginative, Accurate, March 6, 2006
This review is from: A History of the Theory of Investments: My Annotated Bibliography (Wiley Finance) (Hardcover)
Mark Rubinstein is a man who likes to think for himself, which is a good thing for the rest of us. Most readers will be familiar with Mark's contributions to financial economics primarily through his co-authorship, with John Cox and Steve Ross, of the binomial options pricing model - no mean feat, that. But his interests and contributions are far more broad. My personal favorite paper of Mark's is his relatively overlooked "The Strong Case for the Generalized Logarithmic Utility Model as the Premier Model of Financial Markets" [GLUM], published in 1977 as the second chapter of Haim Levy and Marshall Sarnatt's "Financial Decision Making under Uncertainty" (Academic Press New York 1977); this is a wonderful model which places restrictions on tastes a la Arrow, Debreau, Hirshleifer, Cass, Stiglitz , Hakansson, Kraus, Grauer and Litzenberger, rather than placing restrictions on beliefs as in the more conventional models commonly understood to represent "Modern Portfolio Theory", i.e., Markowitz, Sharpe, Treynor, Lintner, Mossin, Fama, Jensen, Black, Scholes and Merton. In the 1977 GLUM paper, Rubinstein notes that the latter, MPT-type, models are not necessarily superior to the former type and chalks their popularity up to historical happenstance and ideological path-dependence: "Men were not lacking in evidence, but inherited habits of thought, which often extended beyond science proper to a worldview, [and] caused them to cling stubbornly to superannuated ideas."
In "A History of the Theory of Investments", Rubinstein achieves two things: first, he presents his own annotated bibliography of nearly 200 of the most important works in theoretical financial economics; second, he presents a much better etiology of these ideas than a reader might find in a textbook presentation, working diligently to correct examples of Robert K. Merton's "Matthew effect". Marrying these two objectives, a daunting task for most mere mortals, seems to have been easy for Mark Rubinstein. He notes, "...much of the forgotten truth about the origins of ideas in financial economics is there for all to see, in older books residing on library shelves or in past journals now often available in electronic form [e.g., JSTOR]. Much of the history of investments has only been rewritten by the victors, and can be corrected from primary sources." As a student, and later as a professor and even practitioner, Rubinstein spent untold time poring through countless thousands of documents -- primary material, methodically working his way forward and backward through the more and less famous papers and their citations and references in the literature, in order to learn these ideas for himself. Along the way he contributed quite a bit himself. A gift to us all was his willingness to publish his notes on each of what he deems to be the 180 or so most important contributions to the field.
Delineating three periods in the literature as "ancient" (pre-1950), "classical" (1950 - 1980, and "modern" (post-1980), Rubinstein educates us about 40 ancient papers, from Leonardo of Pisa's 1202 "Liber Abaci" through Leonard Jimmie Savage's 1954 "Foundations of Statistics", including the works of Pascal, Fermat, Huygens, de Witt, Halley, de Moivre, Bernoulli, Pareto, Arrow, Bachelier, Knight, Keynes, Working, Hicks, Fisher, Cowles, Graham, Williams, Macaulay, von Hayek, von Neumann, Morgenstern, Friedman, and others, even throwing in Kahneman and Tversky's 1979 Prospect Theory for good measure.
Following the "ancient" literature with the "classical" works, Rubinstein precedes Markowitz' 1952 "Portfolio Selection" with Clendenin's 1951 paper on stock price volatility. More than 100 papers are discussed in this section, including all the usual suspects as well as some unusual ones, including Roy, Arrow, Dreze (who along with others anticipated Harrison & Kreps' work on martingales and continuous states), Kendall, Cootner, Friedman, Tobin, Modigliani & [Merton] Miller (whose work was anticipated by J.B. Williams, in his 1938 "Law of the Conservation of Investment Value"), Debreau, Osborne, Alexander, Coase, Muth, Lucas, Stiglitz, Sharpe, Samuelson, Lorie, Pratt, Linter, Mossin, Treynor, Fama, Cohen, Pogue, Farrell, King, Rosenberg, Engle, Hakansson, Jensen, Leland, Roll, MacBeth, Litzenberger, Cass, Black, Scholes, [Robert C.] Merton, Hirshleifer, Rubinstein, Blume, Friend, Basu, Banz, Latane, LeRoy, Kraus, Cox, Grossman, Figlewski, Ross, Malkiel, Varian, Constantinides, Geske, [Edward] Miller, Levy, Rendleman, Bartter, concluding with Breeden's 1979 ICAPM. Rubinstein also includes Merton's 1987 "Simple Model" in the classical period.
Rubinstein's last section, the "modern" period, which admittedly contains little of the behavioral finance literature, covers about 30 significant papers from the famous Grossman and Stiglitz 1980 critique and Leland's 1980 paper on portfolio insurance to Brunnermeier and Parker's 2005 paper on asset pricing bubbles. Researchers in this section include many of those listed in the classical period, as well as Diamond, Verrecchia, [Ken] French, Schwert, Binder, Merges, Mehra, Prescott, Hong, Stein, Ohlson, Berk, Wang, Carhart, Daniel, Grinblatt, Titman, Wermers, Green, Naik, Sagi, Abreu, and Parker.
I wish Rubinstein's excellent History had been available back when I was a student roaming the stacks in the Lippincott library at Penn, poking into old dusty tomes and spending what little money I had Xeroxing all of those old wonderful papers, learning "ancient" and "classical" ideas the hard way. From the APT to the Zero-beta CAPM, Mark Rubinstein has covered about 300 individual ideas in this unparalleled bibliography, with informed and detailed (but economical) discussion of nearly 200 worthy papers. Any serious financial economist should read, and re-read, this exquisite book.
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