Can we predict when football managers are no longer effective?

On Wednesday 28th January, Sir David Hendry visited the ICMA Centre, and gave a joint ICMA Centre and Economics Department seminar on Statistical Model Selection with `Big Data''.

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.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) evaluates research and its impact every six years. Henley Business School faculty were entered into two units of assessment in the national 2014 REF. Both units received excellent results.