Began his career doing convert arb from his dorm room. Dream big ! Second-largest gift in university’s history; department to be renamed Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics Kenneth Griffin, founder and chief executive of Citadel LLC, at a 2016 investing conference in Las Vegas. PHOTO: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS By Ben Leubsdorf Nov. 1, 2017 1:01 a.m. ET 6 COMMENTS The University of Chicago’s prestigious economics department will be renamed for billionaire hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin, who will give $125 million to the university. The Citadel LLC founder and chief executive’s gift, announced Wednesday, will be used to pay for more economics professors, expanded financial aid for students and creation of a research incubator, among other things. “You need resources to take long bets,” said John List, the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the university and chairman of what will now be called the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. Mr. Griffin, who graduated from Harvard University, lives in Chicago and became a University of Chicago trustee in 2014. He said in a statement the university “has transformed our understanding of economics” and its faculty and students “have challenged the status quo to produce pioneering research and path-breaking ideas.” He added, “The culture of rigorous questioning and open discourse at the University of Chicago has opened minds to ideas that have changed the world.” The university, namesake of the Chicago school of economics and long associated with free-market champions like Milton Friedman, is one of the nation’s leading hubs of economic research and thought. Economics is the most popular major and six current Chicago professors are Nobel laureates in economics including this year’s winner, behavioral economist Richard Thaler. The intended gift, coming from the Kenneth C. Griffin Charitable Fund, will be the second-largest in the private university’s history. In 2008, investor David Booth donated $300 million to the business school, which was renamed the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Mr. List said the gift will expand the department’s size and boost resources for faculty members as well as undergraduates and graduate students. It also will pay for a “research incubator that will fund economists across the campus who we feel are good long bets” but whose research wouldn’t necessarily attract funding from more-traditional sources such as government agencies and foundations, he said. An example of such research, he said, would be the groundbreaking work on social problems by the late Chicago economist Gary Becker, who started in the 1950s outside the mainstream but ended up birthing a “core line of thinking” in economics. Becker won the Nobel Prize in 1992. Modern economics research, with elements like big-data analysis and field experiments, is more labor-intensive than past efforts and requires more resources, Mr. List said. “Economists are moving more and more to putting together teams...who are going out and generating their own data rather than standing by passively and waiting for data,” he said. To do that well, he said, “you need a new funding model.”