Biographical note

The late Stephen A. Ross was the Franco Modigliani Professor of Finance and Economics at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the most widely published authors in finance and economics, Professor Ross was known for his work in developing the Arbitrage Pricing Theory as well as his substantial contributions to the discipline through his research on signaling, agency theory, option pricing, and the theory of the term structure of interest rates, among other topics. A past president of the American Finance Association, he also served as an associate editor of various academic and practitioner journals. He was a trustee of CalTech.  Randolph W. Westerfield is Dean Emeritus and the Charles B. Thornton Professor in Finance Emeritus at the University of Southern Californias Marshall School of Business. Professor Westerfield came to USC from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he was the chairman of the finance department and a member of the finance faculty for 20 years. He is a member of the board of trustees of Oaktree Capital mutual funds. His areas of expertise include corporate financial policy, investment management, and stock market price behavior. Bradford D. Jordan is Visiting Scholar in the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida. He previously held the duPont Endowed Chair in Banking and Financial Services at the University of Kentucky, where he was department chair for many years. Professor Jordan has published numerous articles in top journals on issues such as cost of capital, capital structure, and the behavior of security prices. He is a past president of the Southern Finance Association, and he is coauthor of Fundamentals of Investments: Valuation and Management, 9e, a leading investments text, also published by McGraw Hill.