Stephen Alan "Steve" Ross is the inaugural Franco Modigliani Professor of Financial Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is known for initiating several important theories and models in financial economics. He is a widely published author in finance and economics, and is coauthor of one of the best-selling Corporate Finance texts.
 

Ross is best known for the development of the arbitrage pricing theory (mid-1970s) as well as for his role in developing the binomial options pricing model (1979; also known as the Cox–Ross–Rubinstein model). He was an initiator of the fundamental financial concept of risk-neutral pricing. In 1985 he contributed to the creation of the Cox–Ingersoll–Ross model for interest rate dynamics. Such theories have become an important part of the paradigm known as neoclassical finance.
 

Ross served as President of the American Finance Association in 1988. He was named International Association of Financial Engineers' Financial Engineer of the Year in 1996.
 

He gave the inaugural lecture of the Princeton Lectures in Finance, sponsored by the Bendheim Center for Finance of Princeton University, in 2001. It became a book in 2004, defending neoclassical finance, and such notions as the efficiency and rationality of markets, against critics, especially those who describe their work as behavioral finance.
 

He received his B.S. with honors from Caltech in 1965 where he majored in physics, and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1970, and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale School of Management, and MIT.