Births on July 31

Robert C. Merton, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate

Robert Cox Merton (born July 31, 1944) is an American economist, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureate, and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, known for his pioneering contributions to continuous-time finance, especially the first continuous-time option pricing model, the Black–Scholes–Merton model. In 1993 Merton co-founded hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.

In 1997 Merton together with Myron Scholes were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for the method to determine the value of derivatives.

Merton's current research focus is on the topics of lifecycle investing and retirement funding, measuring and monitoring systemic risks in macrofinance, and financial innovation coupled with changing dynamics in financial institutions.