Harry M. Markowitz's Contributions to Financial Economics; Bibliography of Harry M. Markowitz's Publications, 1952-1990

Although Harry M. Markowitz has made a number of contributions both in the areas of economics and operations research, he is in large measure a one-idea author. Yet, there can be few advancements in postwar economics that can rival Markowitz's development of portfolio theory either in terms of originality or the extent to which it provided a structure for subsequent work. In the 3 publications that established portfolio theory, Markowitz made 5 major and novel propositions: 1. The common practice of diversification is inconsistent with the portfolio objective to maximize expected return. 2. A mean-variance objective function is consistent with an investor who maximizes expected utility. 3. Portfolio variance is a function of both security variances and pairwise covariances. 4. Investors are concerned with the set of efficient portfolios. 5. Quadratic programming can be used to complete the set of efficient portfolios.