This is the transcription of the American Finance Association's Presidential Address of January 7, 2017. The address is based on the paper "'https://ssrn.com/abstract=2893930' The Scientific Outlook in Financial Economics"

To avert the impending global Cyber-Finance Insurance Crisis based upon large-scale commercial reliance upon quantitative models with inherent model risks, tail risks, and systemic risks in current form, this post-doctoral thesis makes the following key contributions: Develops the first known...

Investors are periodically challenged with this question: with funds ready to invest, but faced with a market that is generally perceived to be expensive, is it better to wait for a market correction before investing? Many investors are certain that a correction must be around the corner, and...

This paper discusses how real-life statistical analysis/inference deviates from ideal environments. More specifically, there often exist models that have equal statistical power as the actual data-generating model, given only limited information and information processing/computation capacity....

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have an important role in solving high dimensionality stochastic problems characterized by computational complexity. Given their critical importance, there is need for network and security risk management research to relate the MCMC quantitative...

In aftermath of the Financial Crisis, some risk management practitioners advocate wider adoption of Bayesian inference to replace Value-at-Risk (VaR) models for minimizing risk failures (Borison & Hamm, 2010). They claim reliance of Bayesian inference on subjective judgment, the key limitation...

This paper studies stochastic conditional duration models with a mixture of distribution processes for financial asset's transaction data. The mixture component distributions include exponential, gamma and Weibull. The models allow for a correlation between the observed durations and the...

This paper extends a stochastic conditional duration (SCD) model for financial transaction data to allow for correlation between error processes or innovations of observed duration process and latent log duration process with the aim of improving the statistical fit of the model. Suitable...

Several central banks have adopted inflation targets. The implementation of these targets is flexible; the central banks aim to meet the target over the long term but allow inflation to deviate from the target in the short-term in order to avoid unnecessary volatility in the real economy. In this...

Increasingly, professional forecasters and academic researchers present model-based and subjective or judgment-based forecasts in economics which are accompanied by some measure of uncertainty. In its most complete form this measure is a probability density function for future values of the...