Professor Frank Fabozzi celebrates six decades of business education

Professor Frank Fabozzi celebrates six decades of business education

Baseball Hall of Famer and Baltimore Orioles legend Cal Ripken, Jr. earned the title of “Iron Man” by playing a record-setting 2,632 consecutive Major League Baseball games. His advice for longevity and success is “Just show up,” which is the title he gave his book on personal values. More than just showing up, Carey Business School Professor of Practice Frank Fabozzi is celebrating his own Iron Man achievement as he continues to rewrite the book on finance and enters his sixth decade as a business educator.

“Frank is rightfully known as one of the most prolific authors of scholarly articles in finance,” said Carey’s Vice Dean for Faculty and Research Goker Aydin who presented an award to Fabozzi during the 2024 Carey Annual Finance Conference. Aydin noted Fabozzi’s citations rank in the top 1.5 percent among more than 6.8 million published researchers tracked across all scientific fields worldwide.

In business education, Fabozzi is among the most prolific authors in finance, having published more than 120 books on the subject including The Handbook of Fixed Incomes and Securities, which many consider the “bible” for fixed income investing. The Handbook of Fixed Incomes and Securities was first published in 1983 and is still in print today. Business Insider once called the text one of the “most important finance books ever written.” Among his research works, Fabozzi is the co-creator of the Kalotay-Williams-Fabozzi (KWF) short-rate model used to evaluate interest rate derivatives over time.

In addition to his prolific writing, Fabozzi continues to teach generations of business students. His 54-year teaching career started in 1970 at City College of New York where he earned both a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate in economics. Over the decades, he’s held faculty teaching positions at EDHEC Business School, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, and New York University, before coming to Carey Business School in 2021.

“I'm not going to quit. This is just wonderful. I enjoy the students and they're great students,” said Fabozzi. “When I first started teaching, I said, I'm going to retire once I get some students come up and say my mother or my father, they had you. Then I worked on the grandparents. Now after 54 years, I'm talking about the great-grandparents,” he joked.

“Frank was a mythical figure before becoming an actual person and an esteemed colleague. I recall being a young PhD student and noticing an endless collection of popular books that he had co-authored on the shelves of every faculty member in the school,” said James Carey Endowed Professor Federico Bandi. “Reality has been better than myth: I have thoroughly appreciated Frank’s engagement with our students and his willingness to improve our programs.”

Former student Victor Melfa (MS Finance ’23) said the opportunity to learn from Fabozzi was the critical deciding factor in choosing to attend Carey Business School. “It’s an amazing opportunity for prospective students or students at Hopkins to learn directly from someone who has written with Nobel laureates like Harry Markowitz, Robert Shiller, Robert Engle, and Franco Modigliani,” he said.

After 54 years, Fabozzi doesn’t have plans to slow down anytime soon, although he recently retired after 35 years as an independent fund director for BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager with an estimated $8.5 trillion under management. He is still the longtime editor of the Journal of Portfolio Management, a leading academic journal for finance and investing research, and co-editor of the recently launched Journal of Financial Data Science. Fabozzi says he has five new books coming out in the coming months.

“Cheers to Frank’s last 50 plus years and look forward to his next 50,” said Francis J. Carey, Jr. Professor Nagpurnanand Prabhala. “In ‘finball,’ Frank hit home runs, strikes out batters, and has won championships. Cheers to Frank Fabozzi, the original Bronx Bomber in finance.”