The Program for Financial Studies supports research through six focus initiatives, and encourages the creation, translation, and dissemination of research from cross-disciplinary faculty members by coordinating access to computing and data resources; providing research support and assistance; sponsoring membership to professional organizations; overseeing fellowships and grants; and facilitating the integration of research into the MBA curriculum.
Directors: Simona Abis, Assistant Professor of Business (Finance)
Anton Lines, Assistant Professor of Business (Finance)
While technological change has been a common component of economic growth throughout human history, developments over the past three decades—such as modern computing, big data, and the internet—are undoubtedly accelerating the rate of change. The financial services industry has seen rapid exploration and adoption of new technologies but also struggles in areas of legacy infrastructure. How do financial institutions and markets affect value creation, risk and hence the values of the businesses in financial services?
Director: Geoffrey Heal, Donald C. Waite III Professor of Social Enterprise
Assistant Director: Kent Daniel, William von Mueffling Professor of Business
Directors: Lawrence Glosten, S. Sloan Colt Professor of Banking and International Finance
Charles Jones, Robert W. Lear Professor of Finance and Economics and Senior Vice Dean
The structure of trading securities and the activities of brokers and dealers have undergone dramatic changes in recent years as the result of technological changes, globalization, and new regulatory initiatives. Given those changes, how will financial markets adapt? To what extent is regulation advantaging or disadvantaging the United States as a location for initial public offerings, and for securities trading more broadly?
Directors: Harry Mamaysky, Professor of Professional Practice (Finance)
Paul Glasserman, Jack R. Anderson Professor of Business
Paul Tetlock, A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Business
The News and Finance initiative of the PFS addresses one of the key questions in financial economics: how information is transmitted from news into prices. The initiative seeks to combine natural language processing techniques with more traditional economic analysis to gain insight into how markets respond to news and other textual data. Examples of questions of interest to the initiative include the following:
- How can the computer analysis of news, social media, public filings, and other documents be leveraged to develop investment strategies and monitor risk?
- What insights about investor behavior can be gleaned from the analysis of market responses to news?
- What new types of tools for text analysis are needed for applications in finance?
Director: Paul Glasserman, Jack R. Anderson Professor of Business
How should non-financial firms, financial intermediaries, and regulators measure, manage and regulate risk? Recent innovations in quantitative methods, and the experience of heightened volatility in recent years, have created new interest in integrating strategic thinking about capital budgeting with the technical challenges of risk management. These technical challenges have empowered risk managers in organizations, and given new impetus for prioritizing the efficient and prudent management of resources, as well as improving the measurement and regulation of risk within financial intermediaries.
