Francesco Paris, the power of the will

摘要

I am acting as a stand-in for Francesco Paris in writing this Introduction to this Special section that collects some of the papers presented at the conference on "Advances in Asset Pricing and Portfolio Management". This conference, the 36th Semi-Annual Conference of the European Working Group on Financial Modelling, took place at the University of Brescia, in May 2005, and turned out to be the last one organized by Francesco. Prof. Paris was born in Rome on January 26th, 1960. After high school he enrolled at the Faculty of Economics at the LUISS University of Rome where he graduated in 1983 with a thesis on "Foreign Currency Operations of Italian Banks". He was immediately accepted as a doctoral student in a program on "Capital Markets" at the University of Bergamo. He spent the final year of the three year program as a visiting student at the School of Business of NYU as part of the Study Group on Italian Financial Markets and Institutions. This turned out to be the first of many visits to the United States, a country in which Francesco found himself at his ease and where he had many friends.