Stewart Myers

Stewart C. Myers is the Robert C. Merton (1970) Professor of Finance, Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. 

Myers is past President of the American Finance Association, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a principal of the Brattle Group, Inc. His textbook Principles of Corporate Finance (12th ed., with Richard Brealey and Franklin Allen) is known as the “bible” of financial management. 

His research focuses on the valuation of real and financial assets, corporate finance and financial aspects of government regulation of business. He introduced both the tradeoff and pecking order theories of capital structure and was the first to recognize the importance of real options in corporate finance. 

Myers is the author of influential research papers on many topics, including adjusted present value (APV), rate of return regulation, capital allocation and risk management in banking and insurance, real options, payout policy, and moral hazard and information issues in financing decisions. He has served as a director of Entergy Corporation and CAT Ltd. and as a manager of the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance. 

He holds an AB from Williams College and an MBA and a PhD from Stanford University.

Current Research Focus:  Myers's current research focuses on three areas. (1) Theoretical models of the long-run dynamics of capital investment, payout and borrowing decisions by mature public corporations.  The models have important implications for corporate governance as well as corporate finance generally. (2) Efficient allocation of risk capital by banks and other financial firms. (3) Applied work on the valuation of real options.  The valuation results indicate that standard tests of capital structure theories are mis-specified; Myers is designing better tests.