08-27-2025
The Daniels School of Business welcomes Tobias “Toby” Moskowitz (BSIM ’93, MSM ’94) as our newest Distinguished Fellow. The finance thought leader’s innovative research and influence have shaped academic, corporate and public understanding of markets worldwide.
Moskowitz is the prestigious Dean Takahashi ’80 B.A., ’83 M.P.P.M. Professor of Finance at the Yale School of Management, a post he has held since 2016. Prior to his tenure at Yale, he was the Fama Family Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where, starting in 1998, he contributed to making Chicago one of the top centers for economic thought in the world.
His scholarly excellence was recognized by the American Finance Association with the 2007 Fischer Black Prize — awarded to the top finance scholar under 40 — citing his “ingenious and careful use of newly available data to address fundamental questions in finance.” Moskowitz’s research has illuminated topics ranging from momentum in stock returns and the dynamics of asset prices to mutual and hedge fund performance, private business returns and biases in investment portfolios. He has also brought a quantitative lens to areas as diverse as the political economy of financial regulation and the economics of sports.
A principal at AQR Capital Management, Moskowitz bridges academia and industry, ensuring his findings are not only theoretical but also relevant to real-world investing. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a former editor of the Review of Financial Studies, and a former associate editor of the Journal of Finance.
Moskowitz is renowned for transcending traditional boundaries in finance, perhaps most famously with his best-selling book Scorecasting, co-authored with L. Jon Wertheim, which applies economic logic and statistical methods to reveal the hidden dimensions of sports and competition. At Yale, he leads cutting-edge work in asset pricing, quantitative finance and sports analytics, while maintaining a deep commitment to practical, cross-disciplinary research. He is especially passionate about harnessing the power of AI and machine learning to solve contemporary challenges in markets and capitalizing on the explosion in new data to gain new insights into markets and sports.
What makes Moskowitz’s appointment as a Daniels School Distinguished Fellow such a meaningful moment is not only his exceptional expertise but also his eagerness to contribute directly to the Daniels School’s ecosystem of business innovation, technology and interdisciplinary learning.
Moskowitz looks forward to bringing his knowledge in AI and machine learning to Purdue’s undergraduate and graduate students, nurturing the next generation of leaders.
“What excites me most,” he says, “is igniting students’ curiosity — helping them ask better questions, embrace the process of learning through mistake-making, and explore frontier topics like distinguishing between luck and skill in measuring outcomes in both markets and sports.”
For Moskowitz, the Fellows appointment marks a return to his roots. Raised in West Lafayette, he has fond memories of childhood hours on the Purdue campus, attending basketball games, studying in campus libraries and walking the grounds as both the son of a Purdue professor and as an undergraduate himself. (Herb Moskowitz served on the business school faculty from 1970-2008.) Toby’s academic journey — from West Lafayette High School and Purdue, to UCLA for his PhD, and then to Chicago and Yale — has been shaped by curiosity.
“I spent hours in my mentor’s office just asking what I thought were dumb questions,” Moskowitz says. “Eventually, he would say, ‘that's a good question.’ I never thought about that. Once you start to realize that you're pushing on things and asking questions that nobody knows the answer to, that's when you know you are really starting to learn.”
He also learned from peers and mentors, starting with his high school chemistry teacher Jim Guy. “He was the first person who introduced me to the scientific method — you have a hypothesis, you test it with data or experiments, and then you reject or fail to reject that hypothesis. I just remember it opened this new way of thinking — critical thinking or evidence-based decision-making,” says Moskowitz.
Asked what advice he would share with Purdue students, Moskowitz emphasizes: “Be curious. Make mistakes. Keep seeking out rooms full of people smarter than you. And don’t just take the easiest path — take the one with the greatest opportunity.”
Daniels School Distinguished Fellows lecture and join in faculty research conversations and thought leadership events important to Purdue and the business school, particularly in the areas of markets and global economic leadership. In addition to their interactions with faculty, they meet with students, alumni and university and community members.
