Research affiliates work in the areas related to CAFIN focus and regularly participate in CAFIN events. They also contribute papers to the CAFIN working paper series.
Olga Rud
University of Stavanger
Olga Rud is a Professor of Finance at the University of Stavanger. She has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research uses primarily experimental methods to study topics in economics and finance, including the efficiency of dynamic portfolio choices, the role of ETFs, the effect of competition on rating agencies, whether correlated equilibrium can arise without exogenous coordinating signals, a bandit problems in a dynamic setting, the effect of stock splits (and reverse splits) on asset prices, among others.
Olga’s work has been published in journals such as the Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, Journal of Economic Theory, Review of Finance, Games and Economic Behavior, among others.
For more information, please see: https://sites.google.com/view/olgarud
Email: olga.rud@gmail.com
Joshua Aizenman
University of Southern California
Joshua Aizenman joined the faculty at USC in 2013, where he serves as the Dockson Chair in Economics and International Relations. Joshua also serves as a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and co-editor of the Journal of International Money and Finance. Other affiliations have included teaching and research positions at UC Santa Cruz (served as a Presidential Chair of Economics), Dartmouth (served as the Champion Professor of International Economics), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Chicago GSB, and University of Pennsylvania. Consulting relationships include the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
A common thread of Aizenman’s research has been applying a generalized cost benefit approach to international economics and economic development, recognizing political economy goals and constraints. Aizenman’s research covers a range of issues in the open economy, including commercial and financial policies, crises in emerging markets, foreign direct investment, capital controls, and exchange rate regimes.
Eric Aldrich
Amazon
Eric Aldrich is Senior Economist at Amazon. Prior to this position, he was an assistant professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His main interests are supply chain optimization, market design, computational economics and finance. Prior to UCSC, he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Through his publications he has made significant contributions in the empirics of behavioral and computational finance.
Elena Asparouhova
University of Utah
Elena Asparouhova is a Professor of Finance at the David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah. She received her doctorate degree in Social Sciences from the California Institute of Technology and her Masters in Statistics from Sofia University, Bulgaria. Prof. Asparouhova’s research interests are in the area of theoretical and experimental financial economics. They include but are not confined to: the theory of asset pricing, experimental finance, general equilibrium theory, and econometrics. Her recent work has been centered on the effects of competition in financial markets under delegation and under asymmetric information, information percolation in dark markets, the role of perfect forecast in multi- period markets, and market equilibration. She is also involved in experimental research on the interaction of humans and robots in financial markets. She is interested in using experimentation to test the theoretical predictions of standard models as well as to discover robust phenomena on which to build new theory where those models’ predictions are known to be indeterminate. Her papers have received best paper awards at the Journal of Financial Markets and the Review of Finance. Her experimental research “Lucas in the Laboratory” was awarded the best paper at the Behavioral Finance and Capital Markets Conference in Australia, while “Costly Information Acquisition in Decentralized Markets” received the Best Paper in Financial Markets and Institutions Award at the 2017 Annual Meetings of the Financial Management Association. In addition, Prof. Asparouhova’s research has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation for the last ten years.
elena.asparouhova@eccles.utah.edu
Yin-Wong Cheung
City University of Hong Kong
Yin-Wong Cheung is the Head and Chair Professor of International Economics, Department of Economics and Finance, and Director, Research Center for International Economics, City University of Hong Kong. Also he is Professor Emeritus of the Economics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Cheung is member of the Council of Advisers, HKIMR/HKMA, a Research Fellow of the CESifo in Germany, a founding and board member of the Methods in International Finance Network in Europe, and a Chair Professor of the Shandong University. Cheung’s areas of research include econometrics, applied econometrics, exchange rate dynamics, asset pricing, output fluctuation, and economic issues of Asian Economies. Cheung coauthored the books Financial Options (in Chinese) , The Economic Integration of Greater China, and人民币汇率：过去、现在与未来(in Chinese). He also co-edited the following books: China and Asia: Economic and Financial Interactions, Asia and China in the Global Economy, The Evolving Role of Asia in Global Finance, and The Evolving Role of China in the Global Economy. He has published over 100 refereed articles in more than 40 academic journals including Econometric Theory, Game and Economic Behavior, Journal of Business & Economics Statistics, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of International Economics, and Journal of Finance.
Orcan Cortuk
Financial Consultant
Having graduated from the Management Faculty of Istanbul Technical University in Turkey, Orcan Cortuk started his career in 1999 at the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey, where he worked in various departments. He received his Masters Degree on Banking and International Finance from City University Cass Business School in UK in 2004 and his PhD in International Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2011. In March 2013, he started working at Central Securities Depository of Turkey, Merkezi Kayıt Kurulusu (MKK). At MKK, he was responsible for Operations, Depository Services, Investor Relations and Business Development. He is currently a financial consultant and independent researcher.
Peter Cramton
University of Maryland
Peter Cramton is Professor of Economics at the University of Cologne and the University of Maryland. Since 1983, he has conducted research on auction theory and practice. The main focus is the design of auctions for many related items. Applications include auctions for radio spectrum, electricity, and financial securities. He has innovative market designs in many industries. He has advised numerous governments on market design and dozens of bidders in major auction markets. He received his B.S. in Engineering from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in Business from Stanford University.
Sanjiv Das
Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University
Sanjiv Das is the William and Janice Terry Professor of Finance at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business.
He previously held faculty appointments as Associate Professor at Harvard Business School and UC Berkeley. He holds post-graduate degrees in Finance (M.Phil and Ph.D. from New York University), Computer Science (M.S. from UC Berkeley), an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, B.Com in Accounting and Economics (University of Bombay, Sydenham College), and is also a qualified Cost and Works Accountant. He is a senior editor of The Journal of Investment Management, co-editor of The Journal of Derivatives, and Associate Editor of other academic journals.
Prior to being an academic, he worked in the derivatives business in the Asia-Pacific region as a Vice-President at Citibank. His current research interests include: the modeling of default risk, machine learning, social networks, derivatives pricing models, portfolio theory, and venture capital. He has published over eighty articles in academic journals, and has won numerous awards for research and teaching. His recent book “Derivatives: Principles and Practice” was published in May 2010. He currently also serves as a Senior Fellow at the FDIC Center for Financial Research.
Sankar De
Shiv Nadar University, India
Professor Sankar De was associated with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University, as Professor of Economics and Director of Centre for Emerging Societies before his retirement. He has also served as the President of the Asian Finance Association and as a member of the Reserve Bank of India’s committee on Money, Foreign Exchange and Government Securities. Professor De was the founder of the Centre for Analytical Finance (CAF), Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, India and served as its Executive Director before joining SNU. He developed and nurtured CAF to become a premier center of excellence in emerging markets research, organization of high-level research and policy conferences, and training of next generation researchers. He also served as the Executive Director, Center for Professional Development in Finance (CPDF), Berkeley, USA. He has served on the faculty at national and international institutions including University of California-Berkeley, University of Texas-Austin, and University of Wisconsin-Madison, Indian Institute of Management – Calcutta, and Indian School of Business. His current research interests are access to finance for underserved sectors and trading and investment decisions of small investors in emerging economies. He received his PhD in Financial Economics from University of California-Berkeley and Post-Graduate Diploma in Management from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
Francis Diebold
University of Pennsylvania
Francis X. Diebold is Paul F. and Warren S. Miller Professor of Economics, and Professor of Finance and Statistics, at the University of Pennsylvania and its Wharton School. He has published widely in econometrics, forecasting, finance, and macroeconomics, and he has served on the editorial boards of leading journals includingEconometrica, International Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, and Journal of Applied Econometrics. He is an elected Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Statistical Association, and the International Institute of Forecasters, an NBER Faculty Research Assoiciate; the recipient of Sloan, Guggenheim, and Humboldt fellowships, past Co-Director of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center, and past President of the Society for Financial Econometrics. His academic research is firmly linked to practical matters; during 1986-1989 he served as an economist under both Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, during 2007-2008 he served as an Executive Director at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, and during 2012-2013 he served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve System’s Model Validation Council. Diebold also lectures widely and has held visiting professorships at Princeton, Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and NYU. He has received several awards for outstanding teaching, and his academic “family” includes nearly 75 Ph.D. students.
Michael P. Dooley
University of California, Santa Cruz
Michael Dooley joined the faculty at UCSC in 1992 following more than twenty years’ service at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund. His research covers a range of issues in open economy macroeconomics including Bretton Woods II, crises in emerging markets, debt management, capital controls, capital flight and liberalization of financial markets. He is a Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, International Research Fellow, Kiel Institute of World Economics and edit the International Journal of Finance and Economics. Other affiliations have included visiting teaching positions at Bucknell University, George Washington University, The University of Texas, The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, the IMF Institute, the World Bank Economic Development Institute and the Kiel Institute of World Economics. Consulting relationships include the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the Federal Reserve Board and the Bank of Japan. He is currently Professor Emeritus at UCSC.
Rasmus Fatum
University of Alberta
Rasmus Fatum is Department Chair and Foote Professor of International Business at the Department of Marketing, Business Economics and Law at the University of Alberta School of Business. He is Research Associate at the Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and at the Economic Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at the Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen. He has been visiting scholar at the Bank of Japan’s Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies and at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of International Money and Finance.Dr. Fatum’s research focuses on international finance, in particular exchange rate regimes and exchange rate determination, and monetary policy and exchange rate management. Recent outlets for his research include Journal of International Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and Journal of International Money and Finance.
Todd Feldman
San Francisco State University
Todd Feldman is an associate professor of finance at San Francisco State University. His main interests are Behavioral Finance, Agent-Based Modeling, and Financial Economics. Todd’s research has included a diverse set of work on portfolio manager behavior and global financial crises, innovation and stock market cycles, banking and FinTech, understanding the components of private equity returns, and using behavioral finance to improve portfolio management.
tfeldman@sfsu.edu
Daniel Friedman
University of California, Santa Cruz
Daniel Friedman is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has broad research interests in applied economic theory, laboratory experiments, and financial markets. He is one of the world’s leading researchers in behavioral and experimental economics and the founder of LEEPS, a pioneering laboratory studying human behavior in market settings.
Mario Gonzalez
Central Bank of Chile
Mario Gonzalez is a senior economist in the Research Division at the Central Bank of Chile. His research interests lie in the interaction between macroeconomics and finance, monetary policy and international finance. He has applied a dynamic stochastic equilibrium model to study the effects in the transmission of monetary policy shocks in the presence of financial constraints and global banks. He received his PhD in economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. In his research experience he has examined the effect of the financial conditions on growth in Chile, the dynamics of the exchange rate in Chile, and the comovements of financial markets. Previously he worked as an economist in an investment brokerage firm where he forecasted Chilean economic variables, and monitored the banking system in Chile.
Mai Hakamada
The International Monetary Fund
Mai Hakamada is an Economist in the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund. Her research is in the areas of monetary policy and macro-finance. She analyzes both theoretically and empirically the interplay between the financial system and monetary/macroprudential policies. Part of her research studies the implications of the monetary policy for playing the role of stabilizing the risk-taking incentives in the financial sector. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California Santa Cruz.
Chenyue Hu
University of California, Santa Cruz
Chenyue Hu is an assistant professor of economics at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests lie in international economics and macroeconomics, with an emphasis on international finance. Topics she has worked on include international risk-sharing and portfolio arrangement, sovereign default and its consequences, and financial constraint and international trade. In these projects, she combined empirical and theoretical analyses to identify and explain novel facts about international capital mobility. Chenyue received her PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.
Michael Hutchison
University of California at Santa Cruz
Michael Hutchison is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also Research Associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and a founding member of the Santa Cruz Center for International Economics. Hutchison is Executive Editor of the Journal of Asian Economies and on the editorial boards of Journal of International Money and Finance and Japan and the World Economy. His research centers on international finance and open economy macroeconomics, including exchange rate regimes, international banking and financial systems.
Amy Jaffe
Climate Policy Lab, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Amy Myers Jaffe is author of Energy’s Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security and managing director of the Climate Policy Lab and a research professor at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. A leading expert on global energy policy and sustainability, Jaffe has previously served as the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations and Executive Director for energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis, where she led research on low or zero carbon fuels and transportation policy. Jaffe has also served as senior advisor for sustainability at the Office of the Chief Investment Officer at the University of California, Regents, assisting with the design and launch of their sustainable investing strategy. She currently is co-chair of the steering committee of the Women in Energy Initiative at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. Jaffe has taught international energy policy, business, and sustainability courses at Tufts University, Rice University, University of California Davis and Yale University. Jaffe is widely published, including as co-author of Oil, Dollars, Debt and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold, with Dr. Mahmoud El-Gamal. A frequent media commentator, Jaffe was 2020 president of the US Association for Energy Economics and holds a Senior Fellow award from that organization for her career contributions to the field of energy economics. She is a member of the Global Future Council on Net Zero Transition at the World Economic Forum (Davos) and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Bradley Jones
Reserve Bank of Australia
Dr Bradley Jones has served in a variety of roles in the official sector, investment management industry and academia. He is currently Head of the International Department at the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). Prior to joining the RBA, Dr Jones served for 5 years as a Senior Financial Sector Advisor at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and before that, spent a decade in macroeconomic research and investment roles at Deutsche Bank in London and Hong Kong. He holds a First Class Honors Degree in Economics, a Ph.D. in Finance, and is a Fellow at the Center for Endowment Asset Management, Cambridge Business School.
Seoyoung Kim
Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University
Seoyoung Kim is an Associate Professor of Finance and Business Analytics at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, where she teaches Financial Management, Financial Engineering, and FinTech.
Professor Kim’s expertise lies in innovative financial instruments. She is an expert in structured financial instruments, fixed-income pricing, and the optimal restructuring of distressed debt, and she has provided consulting expertise and litigation support with regard to the structuring, management, and liquidation of various special purpose vehicles issuing collateralized debt obligations and asset backed securities. Her expertise extends to crypto-assets, NFTs, and other blockchain-based and blockchain-adjacent ventures – on which she has consulted and written extensively, including her most recent book, NFTs For Dummies, and another currently in progress.
Prior to joining Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, Professor Kim held a faculty appointment at Purdue University. She holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Rice University and Ph.D. in Finance from Emory University.
Athanasios Kottas
University of California, Santa Cruz
Athanasios Kottas is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has expertise on Bayesian nonparametric methods for extreme value analysis, quantile regression and survival analysis. He is the author of over 30 papers and a book chapter on Bayesian modeling. He also acts as editor on various international journals and has presented in several international seminars.
Gregory Laughlin
Yale University
Gregory Laughlin is a professor in the Department of Astronomy at Yale University. His research focuses on the extraction of signals from noisy time-series data, with particular applications being the detection of extrasolar planets, the statistics of high-frequency trading, and the analysis of ultra-low latency microwave communication networks. He is co-author of the textbook Numerical Methods in Astrophysics, and he has published in journals ranging from the Financial Review, to Science and Nature. He maintains a particular interest in the cross-fertilization between the methods of numerical analysis that are used in astrophysics and in quantitative finance.
Jamus Lim
Abu Dhabi Investment Authority
Jamus Lim is an economist in the Strategy Unit at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, where he is responsible for economic analyses and projections that support tactical and strategic portfolio construction. Prior to joining ADIA, he was a senior economist in the Development Prospects Group of the World Bank, which he joined as a Young Professional. He has also had stints in academia (Centre College), the think tank circuit (the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies), and investment banking (the former J.P. Morgan). Lim’s areas of research expertise and interest lie primarily at the intersection of international economics and political economy, with a particular interest in financial crises. He also contributes to the policy dialog with occasional op-eds, posts to the econoblogosphere (at blogs.worldbank.org/prospects), and Twitter (handle @jamuslim). He completed postdoctoral, doctoral, masters, and undergraduate work at Harvard, the University of California (Santa Cruz), the London School of Economics, and the University of Southern Queensland, all in various flavors of economics.
Mingfeng Lin
Georgia Institute of Technology
Mingfeng Lin is an Associate Professor of Information Technology Management at the Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in Business and Management from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is interested in empirical research of online crowdfunding (especially its debt and equity forms), social media, and online labor markets. His research has appeared in premier academic journals such as Management Science and Information Systems Research, and has been funded by the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship, Economic Club of Washington, NET Institute, McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship, among others. His is one of the inaugural editors for the Kauffman Foundation “State of the Field” on crowdfunding (http://sotf.kauffman.org/), and serves on the editorial board of Information Systems Research. He is also a Fellow at the Centre for Alternative Finance, Cambridge Judge Business School.
Vojislav Maksimovic
University of Maryland
“Max” Maksimovic is the William A. Longbrake Chair in Finance and Chair, Department of Finance at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. His recent research focuses on how a firm’s organizational structure affects the flow of resources across its divisions. He has also worked on how competition in high technology industries determines the timing of initial public offerings. Maksimovic is interested in international finance, specifically in how a country’s legal and institutional environment influences the financing and investment by firms. Maksimovic’s research has been published in the Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. Maksimovic has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and the International Monetary Fund. He has a BSc(Econ.) and MSc in Mathematical Economics and Econometrics from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University. He is an associate editor of Journal of Financial Intermediation and a past member of the board of directors of the Western Finance Association.
Allan Malz
Columbia University
Allan M. Malz is the author of Financial Risk Management: Models, History, and Institutions (Wiley, 2011), a survey of quantitative risk management tools and of the public policy issues raised by the financial crisis. He teaches graduate courses on risk management at Columbia University’s School of Engineering. Malz has worked as a risk manager and economist at a number of firms, most recently as a managing director at AIG, Inc., focusing on the exposures of the investment portfolio and insurance liabilities to equity, interest rate and other market risks. Malz was a vice president in the Markets Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2009 to 2014, where he worked on implementation of the Fed’s emergency liquidity programs to address the financial crisis. Previously, Malz was chief risk officer at several multi-strategy hedge fund management firms. Malz was head of research at RiskMetrics Group, which he joined on its spinoff from J.P. Morgan in 1998. Malz spent his earlier career at the New York Fed as a researcher and foreign exchange trader. His research, which includes forecasting financial crises, risk measurement for options, and estimation of risk-neutral probability distributions, has been published in a number of industry and refereed academic journals. Malz holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University.
Kathleen McDill
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
Kathleen McDill is a Senior Financial Economist at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Her previous research has focused on the response of depositors and financial institutions to increases in the risk of bank failure, and the stability of the banking system under stress. Her current research interests include relationship lending, deposit insurance pricing, and banking system stability.
Amilcar A. Menichini
U.S. Naval Postgraduate School
Amilcar Menichini studied Ph.D. in Finance at the University of Arizona and is currently an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The central goal of his research is to answer important questions in corporate finance using state-of- the-art empirical and theoretical methods. His research focuses on the application of dynamic structural models to the study of the different aspects of firm decisions. He has published his work in finance and economics journals such as The Financial Review, International Journal of Managerial Finance, Southern Economic Journal, and Economics Letters.
Terrance Odean
University of California, Berkeley
Terrance Odean is the Rudd Family Foundation Professor and Chair of the Finance Group at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the Journal of Investment Consulting editorial advisory board, of the Russell Sage Behavioral Economics Roundtable, and of the WU Gutmann Center Academic Advisory Board at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He has been an editor and an associate editor of the Review of Financial Studies, an associate editor of the Journal of Finance, a co-editor of a special issue of Management Science, an associate editor at the Journal of Behavioral Finance, a director of UC Berkeley’s Experimental Social Science Laboratory, a member of the Russell Investments Academic Advisory Board, a visiting professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and the Willis H. Booth Professor of Finance and Banking. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, Odean studied Judgment and Decision Making with the 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Daniel Kahneman. This led to his current research focus on how psychologically motivated decisions affect investor welfare and securities prices.
Gurnain Pasricha
Bank of Canada
Gurnain Kaur Pasricha is a Principal Economist in International Policy Issues Division in International Economic Analysis Department. Her division is responsible for supporting the Bank’s participation in international meetings, including the G20 and G7. From July 2017-July 2018, she served as acting Director of the division. Since joining the Bank in 2009, she has also worked in the Financial Stability Department, where her work focused on systemic risk assessment for Canada. Gurnain’s research interests include measuring international financial integration, management of capital flows in emerging economies and the use and effectiveness of capital controls, financial crises and macroprudential policy. She obtained a PhD in International Economics from University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).
Ila Patnaik
National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, India
Patnaik, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Chair Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in New Delhi, specializes in India’s opening economy. Her research focuses on capital flows, business cycles, the financial sector, and the study of Indian firms as India opens up its capital account. Patnaik writes regular columns in the Indian Express and the Financial Express. Before joining the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in 2006, Patnaik served as economics editor of the Indian Express (2004–2006), senior fellow at the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (2002–2004), and senior economist at the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi (1996–2002). Patnaik was also a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund in 2003, 2010, and 2013. Patnaik has served on a number of advisory committees on financial policy and regulation, including the Ministry of Finance Working Group on Foreign Investment (2009–2010), the Ministry of Finance Internal Working Group on Internal Debt Management (2008), and the RBI Working Group on Economic Indicators (2001–2002). She co-led the research team for the Ministry of Finance Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission (2011–2013).
Nicholas Polson
University of Chicago
Nicholas Polson is a Bayesian statistician who conducts research on Financial Econometrics, Markov chain Monte Carlo, Particle learning, and Bayesian inference. Inspired by an interest in probability, Polson has developed a number of new algorithms and applied them to the fields of statistics and financial econometrics, including the Bayesian analysis of stochastic volatility models and sequential particle learning for statistical inference.
Polson’s article, “Bayesian Analysis of Stochastic Volatility Models,” was named one of the most influential articles in the 20th anniversary issue of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. His recent work includes methods for sparse Bayesian estimation with application to high dimensional regression and classification.
Kai Pommerenke
University of California, Santa Cruz
Kai Pommerenke is a continuing lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate finance courses. He is a CFA charterholder with a Ph.D. in economics. Prior to joining UCSC, he worked as a management consultant for many financial institutions on behalf of Booz & Co., founded an EdTech startup and worked for a large European FinTech company.
Hellen Popper
Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University
Professor Popper is an expert in international economics and finance. She is the incoming 2020 Emerging Ethics Scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics; she is a Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research in Singapore, a former Visiting Fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research, and a former Economist at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. She is a Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research in Singapore, a former Visiting Fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research, and a former Economist at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C.
She currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and on the Advisory Board of the DIAGRAM Center, and she has served on the Board of Directors of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. She has consulted for the World Bank and the Federal Reserve, as well as in the private sector, and she has held visiting positions at the University of California at Berkeley, the Bank of Mexico, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. In her role as SCU’s Executive MBA Global Theme Coordinator, she has reviewed scores of foreign expansion plans for Silicon Valley businesses.
Professor Popper teaches and conducts research in international macroeconomics and finance, and in applied data analysis. She has published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Banking and Finance, the European Economic Review, and the Journal of International Money and Finance. She writes op-eds and contributes to public policy discussions in venues such as VOX and National Public Radio.
Professor Popper also currently serves as Associate Dean of the Leavey School of Business, and she has been the Faculty Director of Graduate Business Programs, the Faculty Director of Undergraduate Business Programs, and the Chair of the Department of Economics. In these roles, she has shepherded significant face-to-face and online curricular innovations.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
Raquel Prado
University of California, Santa Cruz
Raquel Prado is a Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in Bayesian non-stationary time series modeling and multivariate time series. She is the author of a book on time series modeling and several papers on time series and medicine. Her latest project focuses on the development of a coherent suite of novel statistical models and methods for large-dimensional, high-resolution multivariate time series to apply them on physiological time series.
Jean Paul Rabanal
Monash University
Jean Paul is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Banking and Finance at Monash University. His main interests are Experimental Finance and Evolutionary Economics. Jean Paul’s research covers an array of issues including asset pricing, behavior of financial intermediaries, macro-finance experiments and numerical methods to solve (evolutionary) dynamic models. He also has professional experience as Chief and Senior Economist for the Congress and the Treasury of Peru.
Abel Rodriguez
University of California, Santa Cruz
Abel Rodriguez will be starting his new position as Professor and Chair of the Department of Statistics, effective September 1, 2020. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics and Decision Sciences from Duke University in 2007. He is currently an Associate Director to the Center for Data, Discovery and Decisions, and a Professor in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). From 2017 to 2019, Prof. Rodriguez served as Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs in Baskin School of Engineering. His research interests include Bayesian statistics and machine learning, especially nonparametric methods, spatial temporal models, network analysis and extreme value theory.
Katheryn Russ
University of California, Davis
Katheryn Russ is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis and served as Senior Economist for International Trade and Finance for the White House Council of Economic Advisors 2015-16. She is a faculty research associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research International Trade and Investment Group and Co-Organizer of the International Trade and Macroeconomics Working Group. She is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a member of the Econofact network.
Rajeswari Sengupta
Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR)
Rajeswari Sengupta is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) in Mumbai, India. In the past she has held research positions at the IFMR Business School, Chennai, the Reserve Bank of India, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in Washington D.C. Her main areas of interest include international finance, open economy macroeconomics, monetary economics and banking, firm financing and financial markets. She was a member of the research secretariat for the Bankruptcy Law Reforms Committee (BLRC) that drafted the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC, 2016) for India. She has published papers in academic journals such as The Journal of International Money and Finance and The World Economy, and written chapters in edited volumes published by the Asian Development Bank, and the G20, among others. She obtained her PhD in Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds two previous degrees in Economics from India, a Bachelor’s degree from Presidency College, Calcutta and a Masters from the Delhi School of Economics.
Ajay Shah
National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, India
Ajay Shah studied at IIT, Bombay and USC, Los Angeles. He has held positions at the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research and the Ministry of Finance, and now co-leads the Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP in New Delhi. He has engaged in academic and policy-oriented research in the fields of Indian economic growth, open economy macroeconomics, public finance, financial economics and pensions.
Ajay Shah’s Research Group Website
Email: ajayshah@mayin.org
Vladyslav Sushko
Bank for International Settlements
Vladyslav Sushko is an economist with Financial Stability Policy at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). In his capacity at the BIS, Dr Sushko is responsible for coordinating central bank/BIS working groups, engagement with market practitioners, briefing of senior BIS and central bank officials, and contributing to BIS publications on the matters pertaining to financial stability and market functioning. He joined the BIS after completing his Ph.D. in International Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2011. Previously, he developed forecasting models for a major credit card company, worked on consulting projects for the World Bank, and held visiting positions at the University of Tokyo and the Institute of Innovation Research at Hitotsubashi University. His research primarily focuses on foreign exchange markets and international capital flows.
Ünay Tamgaç Tezcan
TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey
Ünay Tamgaç Tezcan is an Associate Professor in Economics at TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey. Her research focuses on applied topics in international macroeconomics and finance, with a focus on currency crisis, exchange rate regimes and capital flows. Her recent work is on the relationship between macro prudential policies, capital flows and credit growth in advanced and emerging economies. She is also interested in household consumption-saving behavior. Relatedly she has conducted research on conspicuous consumption and peer effects, and their impact on growth and happiness. She received her Ph.D. in International Economics from the University of California Santa Cruz. She holds an MBA from Middle East Technical University and a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey.
Susan Thomas
Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research
Susan Thomas holds degrees in civil engineering and economics from IIT, Bombay and University of Southern California, Los Angeles, respectively. She is faculty at the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, Bombay. Her research is in financial econometrics and and market microstructure in India. Her engagement with markets include designing the stock market index, real-time risk management system for the clearing corporation, and the use of call auctions. She has worked on projects with the World Bank, IFC, ADB, securities and commodity derivatives exchanges in India, and the Government of India. More recent policy engagements include being a member of the Standing Council of the competitiveness of the Indian Financial Sector and the Bankruptcy Legislative Reforms Committee, set up by the Ministry of Finance, which submitted a draft Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code to the Indian Parliament.
Paul Vroomen
University of California, Santa Cruz
Paul has spent over thirty years in the semiconductor industry, 27 of which were in Silicon Valley. Paul was VP/GM of divisions at three public companies: Zilog, Inc. VLSI Technologies, Inc. and Oak Technologies, Inc. He also was CEO of three venture capital funded start up companies, SandCraft, Inc., Connex Technologies, Inc. and Sandbridge Technologies, Inc. Paul has raised more than $70M in venture capital financing for these companies. He also spent 3 years at Tallwood Venture Capital, LLP, as an executive in residence. During this time he was a Board observer at 5 technology start-ups. Paul has a BSEE (cum laude) from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, an MSEE from the Philips International Institute (now an institute of Eindhoven University of Technology) in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and is working on his PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is researching decision support systems for private equity investment, with an emphasis on equity crowd funding. He has also completed the Managerial Advancement Program at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Business in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Carl Walsh
University of California, Santa Cruz
Carl E. Walsh is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has been on the faculty since 1987. His research focuses on issues in monetary economics and policy. Recent research projects, joint with Federico Ravenna of HEC Montreal, have examined the implications of cyclical unemployment for the design of monetary policy. Walsh’s previous positions include faculty appointments at Auckland University and Princeton University. He has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Kansas, Philadelphia, and San Francisco and the Federal Reserve Board. He is an International Research Fellow of the Kiel World Institute and a CESifo Research Fellow. In addition to numerous journal articles, he is the author of the leading graduate text on monetary economics, Monetary Theory and Policy (MIT Press, 3nd ed., 2010) and is the co-author with Joseph Stiglitz of Economics, an introductory text (Norton, 4th ed. 2006).
Ingrid Werner
Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University
Professor Werner has an MBA and an Ekon. Lic. from Stockholm School of Economics, a PhD from the University of Rochester (1990), and an Honorary Doctorate in Economics from Stockholm School of Economics (2013). She joined the Finance group at Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, in 1998. Professor Werner holds the Martin and Andrew Murrer Endowed Professorship in Finance and serves as Finance Department Chair. She held a National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution (Stanford University) during 1995-1996. She was the 1996-1997 Visiting Research Economist at the New York Stock Exchange, and the 2001-2002 Nasdaq Visiting Academic Fellow.
Professor Werner served on the Economic Advisory Board of the NASD 1998-2000, the Scientific Advisory Board of the Swedish Financial Regulatory Committee 2008-2011, the Academic Advisory Board of the Swedish Finance Research Institute (SIFR) in Stockholm 2006-2013, and she currently serves on the Academic Advisory Board for the Swedish House of Finance (SHOF).
Professor Werner’s research interests range from international finance to market microstructure.
Yu Yongding
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Yu Yongding is academician of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), member of Advisory Committee of National Planning of National Development and Reform of PRC, member of Advisory Committee of Foreign Policy of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of PRC, member of IMF APD Advisory Group, Editor-in-Chief of China and World Economy. He was director-general of Institute of World Economics and Politics(IWEP) with CASS (1998-2009), president of China Society of World Economics (2003-2011), member of Monetary Policy Committee of People’s Bank of China (2004-2006), member of UN commission of the Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System (“Stiglitz Commission”), and member of UN Committee for Development Policy. Yu Yongding was born in Jiangsu province in 1948. He graduated from the Beijing School of Science and Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1969 and worked as electrician at Beijing Heavy Machinery Factory from 1969- 1979. He joined the Institute of World Economics in 1979 and was Research Fellow(1983-1986), Head of Research Department (1986), Senior Research Fellow (1987) and Senior Fellow (1995-). He was elected Academician of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2006.