# Professor Menachem Brenner's development of the volatility index is featured

1 Faculty News January 25, 2018 ![London Review of Books logo 192 x 144](/sites/default/files/styles/246w/public/assets/images/londonreviewofbooks192x144.jpg?itok=OiWp2mSK)>

Excerpt from the [London Review of Books](https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n02/donald-mackenzie/short-cuts) -- "In the mid-1980s, the economists [Menachem Brenner](http://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/menachem-brenner) and Dan Galai began to lobby the US options exchanges to create a ‘volatility index’, based on options prices, that would measure stock-market volatility in a way loosely analogous to – albeit mathematically far more sophisticated than – how the Dow Jones average or the Standard & Poor 500 Index summarises the market’s overall level."

[Read more](https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n02/donald-mackenzie/short-cuts)