Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when they choose a business school. However, the educational experience you will have is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Today, we focus on Luigi Zingales from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Luigi Zingales is known on the Chicago Booth campus for his charm, sense of humor, and humility. But students with whom mbaMission spoke also call him an innovator, citing as evidence his perspective on the discount rates used to evaluate the future cash flows of new and risky ventures (i.e., his ability to mathematically explain why some firms deserve a 30%–50% discount rate). Zingales’s novel approach to solving the mortgage crisis has been profiled in The Economist, and Bruce Bartlett of the National Review Online called his book Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists: Unleashing the Power of Financial Markets to Create Wealth and Spread Opportunity (coauthored with Raghuram G. Rajan; Crown Business, 2003) “one of the most powerful defenses of the free market ever written.”
Zingales is currently the Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at Chicago Booth and faculty director of the school’s Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. During the 2020–2021 academic year, Zingales taught such courses as “The FinTech Revolution” and “Crony Capitalism.” His students call him an “emerging finance superstar”—significant praise, considering the company he keeps at Chicago Booth.
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