Gershon Mandelker, the Katz Alumni Chair Professor Emeritus of Finance and Business Administration who was instrumental in creating his department at the Katz Graduate School of Business during more than 30 years at Pitt, died June 5, 2024.
“He had a national reputation in finance,” recalled Kenneth Lehn, Samuel A. McCullough Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Katz school and Mandelker’s colleague beginning in 1991. “He was one of the major reasons I came to Pitt. I really hit it off with Gershon and really respected the research he had done.”
That research was largely focused on the efficiency of capital markets, including mergers and acquisitions and capital structure issues, Lehn said. “Gershon was a huge advocate of the efficient market hypothesis,” and among the courses Mandelker taught at Pitt was one on the efficiency of a capital market, “whether it actually values companies on the basis of public information.
“Gershon basically built the finance department at Pitt,” Lehn said, helping to bring in a dozen tenure track professors who were also accomplished researchers. “Pitt has a thriving finance department mainly due to the efforts of Gershon.
“He was the ultimate colleague,” Lehn added. “He was always there, always accessible, always offering really insightful comments on papers and workshops. You couldn't ask for a better colleague than Gershon.
“He was just a wonderful man, very compassionate towards his colleagues and students,” Lehn said. “Gershon endured a lot during the Holocaust and, notwithstanding that, there was a lot of compassion in Gershon and a lot of innocence — and I mean that in a flattering way. He had an openness and an intellectual humanity, always open to new ideas but ultimately judging the efficacy of ideas on empirical evidence.”
Gershon Nachman Mandelker was born in Mlyniv, Poland in 1936. He and his father survived the Holocaust by hiding underground and in forests and haystacks. His mother was killed in the Holocaust along with most of his extended family.
After the war, Mandelker lived in displaced persons camps, arriving in Israel in 1948. He earned his bachelor's degree at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, there meeting his wife Ester, who has predeceased him. Their family left Israel in 1969 to be with Mandelker as he pursued his MBA and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. There, he published a seminal paper, “Risk and Return: The Case of Merging Firms.”
His first academic appointment was at Carnegie Mellon University before he joined Pitt, where he was mentor to many students and where his work on test theories that explained the economic behavior of individuals, firms and capital markets was published in numerous journals and books.
He is survived by children Eiran Moshe Mandelker and Sigal Pearl Mandelker and several granddaughters. Memorial contributions are suggested to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, donate.ushmm.org/a/mandelker.
— Marty Levine