Tuck’s Peter Fisher to Launch New Retirement Research Initiative at BlackRock

Clinical Professor Peter Fisher will leave the Tuck School in January to rejoin BlackRock, the multinational investment management firm where he held a variety of roles from 2004–2013. At BlackRock, Fisher will work within the company’s Corporate Strategy team to launch a new firm-wide retirement research initiative with a global scale.

“The initiative will marry BlackRock’s deep knowledge of financial markets and financial modeling with insights into country-level differences in the inequality of wealth and income so that we can help frame choices and provide solutions to the retirement risks of longevity, asset and income volatility, and inflation,” BlackRock said in a statement.

Since joining Tuck in 2013, Fisher has ranked among the school’s most impactful faculty members and his course, The Arrhythmia of Finance, served as a seminal experience for numerous Tuck MBA students.

Fisher designed the course after a career in which he hired and mentored many MBAs and found that they rarely came equipped to read a balance sheet and to understand what he calls “the deeper meaning of double-entry bookkeeping.” Arrhythmia of Finance filled in those gaps and Fisher breathed life into every class session by exploring questions such as “What is the role of chance in your life—and in history?” “Why do you think that?”, “What is money and who says so?”, “What makes capitalism go?” and offering readings that ranged from Tolstoy and Kahneman to Keynes and Warren Buffet.

This year, Fisher earned the 2021 Teaching Excellence Award—an annual recognition honoring the faculty who, in the eyes of their students, have made an outstanding contribution to the quality of their educational experience.

“Arrhythmia of Finance goes beyond finance and is a class about life lessons. It teaches you how to think,” said one of Fisher’s recent students. “Peter Fisher does a great job of expanding the mind beyond the here and now, to the broad cases throughout life.”

As Fisher explained earlier this year, the course was what he always imagined he would teach when he joined the Tuck faculty eight years ago. “But it took me a few years to get it into the zip code that I wanted. The students have been both helpful and wonderful. I have learned a great deal.”