Gene Fama’s Impact: A Quantitative Analysis

Abstract

This paper provides a quantitative perspective on Gene Fama’s influence on the scholarly community. He has more than 140,000 Google cites while the median number of citations for the Fellows of the American Finance Association is 32,792. Gene Fama has published highly-cited papers in six decades. His most impactful theoretical work took place earlier than his most impactful empirical work. While Gene Fama’s most impactful empirical asset pricing work was published in the Journal of Financial Economics, his most impactful theoretical/conceptual work was published in the Journal of Finance and in the Journal of Law and Economics. An important dimension of the impact of Gene Fama on the finance profession is through his Ph.D. students. These students include one Nobel prize winner, six AFA presidents, and four editors of top finance journals