Zvi Bodie (born April 27, 1943) is an independent educator, writer, speaker, and consultant on finance and the financial system. He is also Professor Emeritus at Boston University where he taught from 1972 to 2013. He has published widely on pension finance and investment strategy in leading professional journals. Bodie is best known for applying modern financial theory to lifecycle saving and investing. He has popularized the idea of hedging against inflation using series I savings bonds, TIPS, and CPI-linked annuities in defined contribution pension and saving plans. He also has advocated strategies that guarantee a minimum retirement life-long income regardless of the performance of the stock market. He has published books and papers in academic journals and co-authored two textbooks and two books for the mass market. During his long academic career starting in 1970 he directed major research projects for the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Pension Research Council. With the support of the CFA Institute Research Foundation, he organized a series of three conferences on the future of lifecycle saving and investing (2006, 2008, 2010), and he edited the resultant conference volumes. Together with Nobel Laureate Robert C. Merton, he has developed a framework for the analysis of financial system design that they call Functional and Structural Finance. FSF is a synthesis of neoclassical, transaction cost, and behavioral theories of finance. It rests on the view that there are six basic functions that a financial system performs and that change very slowly over time and across borders. The institutions that perform these functions change much more quickly and differ across borders.
Bodie's books include Foundations of Pension Finance, Pensions in the U.S. Economy, Issues in Pension Economics, and Financial Aspects of the U.S. Pension System. is textbook, Investments, coauthored with Alex Kane and Alan Marcus is used in all the major business schools around the globe. It has been translated into 10 languages in addition to English. He has also co-authored an introductory textbook Financial Economics with Nobel Laureate in Economics, Robert C. Merton. It has been translated into 9 languages.
He has served on the finance faculty at the Harvard Business School (1992-1994) and MIT Sloan School of Management (2008-9). In 2007 the Retirement Income Industry Association gave Bodie their Lifetime Achievement Award for applied research.[3] And in 2019, the Plan Sponsors Council of America selected him for their lifetime achievement award.
He holds a Ph.D in economics (1975) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a M.A. in Economics (1970) from the Hebrew University, and a B.A. with Honors in Philosophy (1965) from Brooklyn College.
