Economics (and by extension finance) is arguably one of the most mathematical fields of research. However, economists' choice of math may be inadequate to model the complexity of social institutions.In a constructive spirit, this note offers some advice on how students could increase their...

I have divided this testimony into four sections, which discuss: (1) several types of automation currently being deployed in capital markets and the financial sector, and how they affect decision-making; (2) how machine learning (ML) and automation can help and hurt workers by disruption of the...

Machine learning (ML) algorithms utilize the power of computers to solve tasks that are beyond the grasp of classical statistical methods. However, ML is often perceived as a black-box, hindering its adoption. This seminar demonstrates the use of Shapley values to interpret the outputs of ML...

Classical statistics (e.g., Econometrics) relies on assumptions that are often unrealistic in finance. Two critical assumptions are that the researcher has perfect knowledge about the model's specification, and that the researcher knows all the variables involved in a phenomenon (including all...

We investigate the use of machine learning (ML) and other robust-estimation techniques in event studies conducted on single securities for the purpose of securities litigation. Single-firm event studies are widely used in civil litigation, with billions of dollars in settlements hinging on the...

The rate of failure in quantitative finance is high, and particularly so in financial machine learning. The few managers who succeed amass a large amount of assets, and deliver consistently exceptional performance to their investors. However, that is a rare outcome, for reasons that will become...

Empirical Finance is in crisis: Our most important "discovery" tool is historical simulation, and yet, most backtests published in leading Financial journals are flawed.The problem is well-known to professional organizations of Statisticians and Mathematicians, who have publicly criticized the...

We prove that high simulated performance is easily achievable after backtesting a relatively small number of alternative strategy configurations, a practice we denote “backtest overfitting”. The higher the number of configurations tried, the greater is the probability that the backtest is...

Many investors rely on market experts and forecasters when making investment decisions, such as when to buy or sell securities. Ranking and grading market forecasters provides investors with metrics on which they may choose forecasters with the best record of accuracy for their particular market...

We develop a novel ranking methodology to rank the market forecaster. In particular, we distinguish forecasts by their specificity, rather than considering all predictions and forecasts equally important, and we also analyze the impact of the number of forecasts made by a particular forecaster....