Organizations and Markets

Mike Jensen Explains SSRN

6 June 2008 at 12:20 pm Peter G. Klein 5 comments

| Peter Klein |

Mike Jensen, the distinguished financial economist and co-founder of SSRN, is interviewed here by Growthology’s Tim Kane. Everyone knows that electronic distribution of working papers has been extremely important for academic research in business and the social sciences. By the time most papers are published, they’ve already been read by many, if not most, of the target readers, from working-paper circulation, conference presentations, informal discussions, and the like. Jensen points out that electronic distribution has also had an important democratization effect. The elites always had access to cutting-edge research in advance of publication through informal networks, NBER workshops, and the like. “In my own field, I was part of a very small group doing cutting-edge work in the early days of modern finance, and I noticed that elites in all fields were 2-3 years ahead of other scholars just because they knew about research that took so much time to get distributed widely. The Internet allowed everyone to see the frontier.”

Note also Jensen’s comments about behavioral finance:

In the 1970s, I began to receive [as editor of the Journal of Financial Economics] quite a few papers challenging the efficient market hypothesis. The referees rejected them and I rejected them. Any one of these articles standing alone could be rejected, but I began to feel that as a package they cannot be ignored.  The authors were onto something, even if we didn’t see it. Sometime around 1975, over the objection of my referees — many of them close friends — we published a special issue with a collection of those papers.  That was controversial but proved to have great value. Subsequent to that, behavioral financial economics evolved. 

In creating SSRN, I envisioned an alternative distribution vehicle.

Jensen has also been an important friend of and advisor to CORI, delivering the annual CORI Distinguished Lecture in 2005.

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