Statistical Model Selection with `Big Data' by Sir David Hendry

The ICMA Centre is pleased to announce up to five scholarships of a maximum of £15,000 for our full-time Masters programmes are now available to students studying at the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest.

The large fine imposed on RBS last week suggests that a ‘scandal’ took place in the banking world over the setting of LIBOR. Yes – there was probably systematic mis-pricing of LIBOR which enabled some traders and some banks to profit at the expense of others. But the LIBOR issue simply highlights a much wider problem in financial markets which is that many ‘prices’ quoted in markets are not market prices at all. Instead they are prices based on computer models, matrix pricing or sheer guesswork, which may or may not produce ‘accurate’ prices. The reason for using computers models and guesswork is that in many financial products there actually are no transactions at all or very few even over periods of some weeks or months and thus no market prices.

A recent research paper, “Strategic risk shifting and idiosyncratic volatility”, by Dr Nicholas Chen with his co-authors, has been accepted for presentation at the 2015 Western Finance Association Meetings. The conference is highly prestigious with an acceptance rate from submitted papers of only 8%.