In memory of Bertil Näslund - Pioneer in Finance at SSE

feb. 29, 2016

Professor emeritus Bertil Näslund has passed away at an age of 82. He was born in Örnsköldsvik in 1933 and studied at SSE where he received a master’s degree (civilekonom) in 1955. He also studied engineering physics (teknisk fysik) at the Royal Institute of Technology, where he earned a master’s degree in 1963.

On the recommendation from his advisor at SSE, Paulsson Frenckner, he got a scholarship to spend a year at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh in order to learn modern approaches to business education. Carnegie-Mellon in the 1960s was a very lively intellectual environment with no less than four future Nobel Laureates on its faculty – Robert Lucas, Merton Miller, Franco Modigliani, and Herbert Simon. As it turned out, Bertil stayed on there and entered into doctoral studies in management science and operations research. He received his doctoral degree in 1964 with a dissertation, Decision Under Risk, where he employed the method of chance-constrained programming, developed by his thesis advisor William Cooper, to problems in investment and portfolio analysis.

On his return to Sweden, Bertil Näslund’s first academic position was as associate professor (laborator) of business administration at the University of Forestry (Skogshögskolan). In 1966, at age 33, he was appointed as the first professor at the new department of business administration at Stockholm University, a position that he held until 1971 when he moved to Brussels to take part in setting up the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM). A couple of years later, in 1973, he was invited to succeed his teacher Paulsson Frenckner as professor of business administration and head of the cost accounting group at SSE. There, he and his colleagues introduced the first modern finance courses at SSE. Bertil further developed his interest in finance during a two-year stay as a visiting professor at New York University between 1981 and 1983.

On his return from NYU, time was ripe to set up a separate finance department, where Bertil became the first chairman in 1987. Joining forces with colleagues both from economics and business administration, he developed an integrated course program in finance which quickly became very popular with the students. Bertil was able to draw on his wide international network to invite leading scholars as guest researchers and lecturers. This proved beneficial both for raising teaching quality and for stimulating junior colleagues and PhD students. On his retirement in 2000, Bertil could look back on a dynamic period where the finance department had grown from a small, local operation into an internationally highly visible institution. Visibility was further enhanced by several initiatives like hosting the conference of the European Finance Association in 1989 – where Bertil was elected chairman for 1990 – and a Nobel Symposium on law and finance in 1995.

As a researcher, Bertil Näslund had a very fertile mind and his research spanned wide areas ranging from his early work on stochastic decision theory and models of firm dynamics to more recent contributions in finance, particularly on option pricing. Inspired by his Carnegie-Mellon upbringing, he applied quantitative methods in a wide variety of areas including neo-Ricardian theory and the theory of labor-managed firms. Together with his wife, Birgitta Wadell, he wrote a book on theories of the firm. In appreciation of his contributions he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Engineering Sciences. For several years, he served as a member and chairman of the committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.