Fischer Black was one of the greatest innovators of modern financial and derivatives pricing. In the early 1970s, together with economist Myron Scholes and with the help of Robert Merton, Black jointly developed the widely used Black-Scholes pricing model. In 1997, two years after Black’s death, Merton and Scholes took the stage in Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in Economics for this model that has permeated financial markets and actively captures the appropriate risks when pricing complex instruments. Black was also a pioneer in his theory that human capital and business have unpredictable ups and downs and that discretionary monetary policy could not impact business cycles as much as popularly thought. Black has also received recognition as the co-author of the Black-Derman-Toy interest-rate derivatives model, which was developed for in-house use by Goldman Sachs in the 1980s and ultimately was widely adopted across the industry.
