It is with great regret that I write these words of remembrance and homage to Professor João da Silva Ferreira. Born in November 1936, Professor João da Silva Ferreira began his studies at the Commercial School of Chaves and then went to the Commercial Institute of Porto where he completed his secondary education in 1954. He then attended the FEP - Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto until 1957, transferring in that year to Lisbon, more specifically to ISCEF (now ISEG), where he graduated in Finance, in 1960, with an average of 16 values. In 1967 he was admitted to the "Centre Interarmées de Recherche Opérationnelle", where he studied until 1969. He then traveled to the United States to pursue a doctorate in 1981 at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in the area of Corporate Finance and Capital Markets.
He developed his academic career first at ISEG, where he started in 1964 as 2nd assistant, in the chair of Economic Geography. After his return from France, he taught and directed the chair of Operational Research until 1975.
In 1980, he was hired by the University of Houston in Texas to teach in the Finance Department of the College of Business.
Upon his return to Portugal in 1982, he was hired as an Invited Associate Professor by the Faculty of Economics of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (today Nova SBE) and, in 1986, became an Associate Professor of the same school, where he remained until 1993, teaching and even being a member of its Board of Directors. During this period he also collaborated with the Portuguese Catholic University.
In 1993 he was hired by ISEG as Full Professor of Finance, where he taught until his retirement. Here, in addition to teaching, he coordinated the Master in Management, the Postgraduate Program in Financial Analysis, and was Chairman of the Management Department.
From what has been left above, it is therefore natural that he has dedicated a large part of his academic life to teaching financial markets and investments and corporate finance. For, if at the beginning of his career, he taught Operations Research, later and more prolonged, he taught subjects related to financial markets, namely Financial Markets and Investments and Derivative Financial Assets.
As a lover, connoisseur and promoter of the capital market, he has always defended its development with absolute respect for the law and ethics.
It is, in fact, in this spirit of stimulating financial knowledge, that he embraced the translation into Portuguese of one of the most striking books on corporate finance in its first Portuguese version: the book by Brealey and Myers "Principles of Corporate Finance".
Naturally, his knowledge of the capital market led him to be invited to the Privatization Monitoring Committee and also to be a member of the Committee of the Regions. steering committee of the PSI20 Index where it remained since its creation, until 2019.
At ISEG, he was Chairman of the Department of Management, having been decisive in the way he managed the Department and managed to definitively reverse the course of its evolution, and thus that of ISEG. Under his leadership, the faculty recruitment policy was profoundly revised, having strongly encouraged a large batch of professors to develop their doctoral studies in British and American universities. The result of this generation of young teachers is today a more open, technically prepared and internationally integrated School.
But above all, Professor João da Silva Ferreira was a good friend who helped all the young people who wanted to study, learn and progress in academia. A good academic and a good scholar.
So long.
João Duque
