Richard Roll (born October 31, 1939) is an American economist and professor of finance at CalTech, best known for his work on portfolio theory and asset pricing, both theoretical and empirical.
His Ph.D. thesis, "The Behavior of Interest Rates: An Application of the Efficient Market Model to U.S. Treasury Bills," won the Irving Fisher Prize as the best American dissertation in economics in 1968.
Roll has co-authored major papers with Stephen Ross,[2][3][4] Eugene Fama,[1][5][6] Michael Jensen[1] and Kenneth French.
[7] Roll took an Assistant Professor position at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1968, a professorship at the European Institute for Advance Studies in Management in 1973, and Centre d'Enseignement Superiéure des Affaires in 1975.
In 1976, Roll joined the faculty at UCLA, from which he retired as Japan Alumni Chair Professor of Finance in 2014.