Douglas T. Breeden is the William W. Priest Professor of Finance and former Dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Previously, he served on faculties at Chicago Booth, Stanford and North Carolina. He was the Fischer Black Visiting Professor of Financial Economics at MIT’s Sloan School in 2011-2013, winning an “Outstanding Teacher” award.

Breeden published seminal research on insurance prices implicit in option prices, the Consumption CAPM, the term structure of interest rates, and option-adjusted spreads (OAS) on mortgage securities. His research with Robert Litzenberger on “Central Bank Policy Impacts on the Distribution of State Prices for Future Interest Rates,” won a Roger Murray Prize from the Q-Group. He presented this research to central bank meetings in the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and on CNBC TV. His latest publication is “Stock Market Insurance Prices, B-L Skew, Conditional Marginal Utilities and the Equity Risk Premium” in the Fall 2024 issue of the Journal of Investment Management.

Breeden was Associate Editor of all 3 top finance journals and Founding Editor and Editor for 10 years of the Journal of Fixed Income. He was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Finance Association and in 2010 a lifetime Fellow (only 60 in the world). He also served on the Board of the Financial Management Association.

He was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Commonfund, a leading money management firm for nonprofits and endowments. He was Co-founder and Chairman for 23 years of Smith Breeden Associates, a money management firm. He also was Chairman of Roosevelt Financial Group (St. Louis), and Community First Financial Group and Harrington Financial Group of Indiana. The International Association for Quantitative Finance named Breeden “Financial Engineer of the Year 2013” for being an “industry pioneer.” 

Breeden holds a Ph.D. in Finance from Stanford and an S.B. from M.I.T. He served on the MIT President’s Council and the Stanford Business School Advisory Council. He was an Honorary Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

Breeden has been active in philanthropy. He provided naming grants for Breeden Hall and the Breeden Professorship at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, Breeden Theater at Episcopal High School and the Breeden Memorial Library in his hometown of Leavenworth, Indiana. 

​(Bio)​