Viral V. Acharya is an Assistant Professor of Finance at London Business School since Fall 2001 and a Research Affiliate of the Center for Economic Policy Research CEPR). He holds a Ph.D. in Finance from Stern School of Business, New York University and a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. His research interests are in banking, risk management and regulation of banks, corporate finance, valuation of corporate debt, asset pricing with liquidity risk, general equilibrium, and interactions of these fields. He has published articles in the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and Financial Analysts Journal. He is the recipient of Best Paper Award in Corporate Finance - Journal of Financial Economics, 2000, Best Paper Award in Equity Trading - Western Finance Association Meetings, 2003, and Outstanding Referee Award for the Review of Financial Studies, 2003.







Edward I. Altman

Edward I. Altman is the Max L. Heine Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business, New York University. Since 1990, he has directed the research effort in Fixed Income and Credit Markets at the NYU Salomon Center and is currently the Vice-Director of the Center. Prior to serving in his present position, Professor Altman chaired the Stern School's MBA Program for 12 years. He has been a visiting Professor at the Hautes Etudes Commerciales and Universite de Paris-Dauphine in France, at the Pontificia Catolica Universidade in Rio de Janeiro, at the Australian Graduate School of Management in Sydney and Luigi Bocconi University in Milan.

Dr. Altman has an international reputation as an expert on corporate bankruptcy, high yield bonds, distressed debt and credit risk analysis. He was named Laureate 1984 by the Hautes Etudes Commerciales Foundation in Paris for his accumulated works on corporate distress prediction models and procedures for firm financial rehabilitation and awarded the Graham & Dodd Scroll for 1985 by the Financial Analysts Federation for his work on Default Rates on High Yield Corporate Debt and was named "Profesor Honorario" by the University of Buenos Aires in 1996. He is currently an advisor to the Centrale dei Bilanci in Italy and to several foreign central banks. Professor Altman is also the Chairman of the Academic Council of the Turnaround Management Association. Dr. Altman was named to the Max L. Heine endowed professorship at Stern in 1988. He was inducted into the Fixed Income Analysts Society Hall of Fame in 2001 and elected President of the Financial Management Association (2002). He received his MBA and Ph.D. in Finance from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Professor Altman is one of the founders and an Executive Editor of the international publication, the Journal of Banking and Finance and Advisory Editor of a publisher series, the John Wiley Frontiers in Finance Series. Professor Altman has published or edited almost two dozen books and over 100 articles in scholarly finance, accounting and economic journals. He is the current editor of the Handbook of Corporate Finance and the Handbook of Financial Markets and Institutions and the author of a number books, including Recent Advances in Corporate Finance; Investing in Junk Bonds; Distressed Securities: Analyzing and Evaluating Market Potential and Investment Risk; Corporate Financial Distress and Bankruptcy and his most recent works on Managing Credit Risk: The Next Great Financial Challenge (1998) and Bankruptcy, Credit Risk and High Yield Junk Bonds (2002). His work has appeared in many languages including French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish.

Dr. Altman's primary areas of research include bankruptcy analysis and prediction, credit and lending policies, risk management in banking, corporate finance and capital markets. He has been a consultant to several government agencies, major financial and accounting institutions and industrial companies and has lectured to executives in North America, South America, Europe, Australia-New Zealand, Asia and Africa. He has testified before the U.S. Congress, the New York State Senate and several other government and regulatory organizations and is a Director and a member of the Advisory Board of a number of corporate, publishing, academic and financial institutions.

Dr. Altman is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the InterSchool Orchestras of New York and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of American Financial History.







Richard Cantor

Richard Cantor is Managing Director of the Credit Policy Research Group, which conducts default research and measures ratings performance. He is a member of the Moody's Credit Policy Committee and co-chairs Moody's Academic Advisory Panel. Prior to his current position, he was a Senior Vice President in the Financial Guarantor Ratings Group, which rates financial guaranty insurers and reinsurers.

ichard joined Moody's seven years ago from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he held a variety of positions in the Research Group and at the Discount Window. Prior to the Fed, Richard taught Economics at UCLA and Ohio State and has taught on an adjunct basis at the Business Schools of Columbia University and NYU. He has published widely in finance and macroeconomics. Richard received a B.A. from Tufts University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University.







Pierre Collin-Dufresne

Pierre Collin-Dufresne is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Haas School of Business of U.C. Berkeley since 2004. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1998 from the HEC School of Management, Paris, France, he started as an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration of Carnegie Mellon University, where he became Associate Professor in 2003. Dr. Collin-Dufresne's teaching and research interests include Asset and Contingent Claim Pricing, Fixed Income Securities, Default Risk, Emerging Markets, International Finance, and Real Estate Economics. He has served as a consultant for multiple financial institutions and has several publications in refereed journals such as Econometrica, Journal of Finance, and Journal of Derivatives. He is a member of the Center for Computational Finance of Carnegie Mellon University and an associate editor of the Review of Financial Studies. He currently serves on the Advisory Research Board of Moody's.







Darrell Duffie

Darrell Duffie is the James I. Miller Professor of Finance, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, where he has been since 1984. He is a member of the Board of the American Finance Association, and of Moody's Academic Credit Risk Committee, among other professional and academic affiliations. Duffie teaches and does research on topics in asset valuation, is the author of Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory (3rd edition, Princeton University Press) and is co-author, with Kenneth Singleton, of Credit Risk (Princeton University Press).







Robert F. Engle

Robert F. Engle is the Michael R. Armellino Professor of the Management of Financial Services at NYU Stern School of Business, Department of Finance. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Statistical Association. He has recently given the invited Fisher-Schultz lecture, the William Phillips lecture, the Pareto lecture, the Frank Paish lecture, the Journal of Applied Econometrics Lectures and the first Econometric Institute/Princeton University Press Lectures at Erasmus University. His research has introduced some of the most influential concepts in modern econometrics - ARCH/GARCH models, Cointegration, Weak Exogeneity, Band Spectrum Regression, Common Features, Autoregressive Conditional Duration (ACD), the CAViaR Model and most recently Dynamic Conditional Correlation. In well over 100 academic journal articles and four books, he has applied these methods to analyze equities, options, currencies, and interest rates and market microstructure. He is a frequent speaker and consultant for financial institutions. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and an M.S. in Physics from Cornell University. He was at UCSD from 1975-2001 and was named Chancellor’s Associates Professor of Economics. Before UCSD, he was Associate Professor of Economics at MIT.







Stephen Figlewski

Stephen Figlewski is a Professor of Finance at the New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business, where he has been since 1976. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a Ph.D in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published extensively in academic journals, especially in the area of financial futures and options. He is the founding Editor of The Journal of Derivatives and an Associate Editor for several other journals. He also edits the Financial Economics Network's two "Derivatives" series published over the Internet. He is the director of the NYU Stern School Derivatives Research Project, a research initiative that supports applied and theoretical research on derivatives and promotes intellectual interchange between academics and practitioners in derivatives, risk management, and financial engineering.

Professor Figlewski has also spent time on Wall Street. He was a Vice President at the First Boston Corporation, in charge of research on equity derivative products, and was at one time a member of the New York Futures Exchange and a Competitive Options Trader at the New York Stock Exchange.







Robert L. Geske

Robert Geske is Professor of Financial Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Vice President at CATS Software Inc. Dr. Geske previously served as CEO and was a Founding Principal of LOR/Geske Bock Associates (LOR/GB), which was acquired by CATS. He has published numerous articles on the subjects of option pricing, volatility estimation, interest rate risk and inflation in financial journals. Dr. Geske has received research grants from the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance at Columbia University and the Huebner Foundation for Insurance Research at Wharton. He has been the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship. He serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Portfolio Management. Dr. Geske has consulted for a number of public and private clients, including the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and numerous commercial and investment banking institutions. Dr. Geske received his Ph.D. degree in financial economics from the University of California, Berkeley.







Michael Gordy

Michael Gordy is a senior economist in the Research & Statistics
Division of the Federal Reserve Board. His current research focuses on the design, calibration, computation and validation of models of portfolio credit risk, and on the adaptation of these models to setting regulatory capital requirements. Mr. Gordy is recipient of Risk's 2004 Quant of the Year and GARP's 2003 Financial Risk Manager of the Year, and serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Banking & Finance. Mr. Gordy received his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 1994 and a B.A. in Mathematics & Philosophy from Yale University in 1985.







Darryll Hendricks

Darryll Hendricks is a Senior Vice President in the Bank Supervision Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he has responsibility for policy-related issues. He attends meetings of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and currently chairs its Capital Task Force, which has primary responsibility for revising the Basel Capital Accord. Darryll joined the New York Fed in 1992 after graduating with a PhD in public policy from Harvard University.











John Hull

John Hull is the Maple Financial Group Professor of Derivatives and Risk Management in the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and Director of the Bonham Center for Finance. He is an internationally recognized authority on derivatives and has many publications in that area. Recently his research has been concerned with credit risk, executive stock options, volatility surfaces, market risk, and interest rate derivatives. He was, with Alan White, one of the winners of the Nikko-LOR research competition for his work on the Hull-White interest rate model. He has acted as consultant to many North American, Japanese, and European financial institutions.

He has written two books "Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives" (now in its fifth edition) and "Fundamentals of Futures and Options Markets" (now in its fourth edition). Both books (published by Prentice Hall) have been translated into several languages and are widely used in trading rooms throughout the world. He has won many teaching awards, including University of Toronto's prestigious Northrop Frye award, and was voted Financial Engineer of the Year in 1999 by the International Association of Financial Engineers.

In addition to the University of Toronto, Dr. Hull has taught at New York University, York University, University of British Columbia, Cranfield University, and London Business School. Earlier in his career he worked as a corporate planning analyst with British Shoe Corporation. He is an Associate Editor of eight academic journals.







Stephen Kealhofer

Stephen is a founder of KMV and is involved with research at Moody's KMV. Prior to forming KMV, Stephen was Director of Research for Diversified Corporate Loans in San Francisco. He has taught investment management and corporate finance at Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley. He received his B.A. in economics from Macalester College, and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.











David Lando

David Lando is professor of finance at The Copenhagen Business School’s Department of Finance. He holds a Masters degree from the joint mathematics-economics program at the University of Copenhagen and a Ph.D. in statistics from Cornell University. His main area of research in finance is credit risk modelling and risk management. He has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington and is currently a member of Moody's Academic and Advisory Research Committee. He is on the editorial board of three international finance journals. Before joining the Copenhagen Business School, he was a professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Copenhagen.







Hayne E. Leland

Hayne E. Leland is the Arno Rayner Professor of Finance at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Berkeley, he taught economics at Stanford University. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from Harvard, and his M.Sc. (Econ.) degree from the London School of Economics.

In 1997 Professor Leland served as President of the American Finance Association, a national organization with about 5,000 members. He was Director of the Berkeley Program in Finance, 1991-2001. He currently consults for both private and government groups, and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of EuroPlace, the French financial market.

Professor Leland has published numerous articles on investment theory, optimal portfolio choice, and the uses of derivatives in investment management. Recently he has also worked extensively on optimal financing and risk management by corporations. His research has received several prizes for excellence, and he has given keynote speeches at the American Finance Association, the Financial Management Association, and the Association for Investment Management and Research.

His work developing dynamic asset allocation and portfolio insurance has been widely cited and applied to portfolio management. As a founding principal of Leland O’Brien Rubinstein (LOR), he was named a Fortune Magazine “Businessman of the Year” in 1987. His profile and the story of portfolio insurance is contained in Peter Bernstein’s book, Capital Ideas.







Francis Longstaff

Francis Longstaff is a Professor of Finance at the Anderson School at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Chicago. He is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). From 1995 to 1998, Professor Longstaff was Head of Fixed Income Derivative Research at Salomon Brothers Inc. in New York. Professor Longstaff's research includes term structure theory and fixed income derivative valuation and risk management. Other interests include the impact of liquidity on the valuation of securities. He has published more than forty articles in academic journals. Professor Longstaff serves on the Board of Directors of an Asian-based hedge fund, Simplex Capital Ltd.







Ian Marsh

Ian Marsh is a senior lecturer in finance at Cass Business School in London and a senior research fellow at the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance at Cambridge University. He joined the economics faculty at Strathclyde University on completed his PhD, and moved to Cass in 1998. Ian spent academic years 2001/02-2002/03 on leave in the Financial Stability area of the Bank of England where his interest in credit derivatives was sparked.
















Robert Merton

Robert C. Merton is currently the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at the Harvard Business School. Prior to joining the faculty of Harvard in 1988, he served on the finance faculty of MIT's Sloan School of Management for eighteen years. He is a co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Integrated Finance Limited, a specialized investment bank. He is a past President of the American Finance Association and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1997 Professor Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a new method to determine the value of derivatives.

Professor Merton has also been recognized for his achievements in translating finance science into practice. In 1993, he received the inaugural Financial Engineer of the Year Award from the International Association of Financial Engineers. Derivatives Strategy magazine named him to its Derivatives Hall of Fame in 1998. In 2002, Risk magazine named him to its Risk Hall of Fame and in 2003, presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to the field of risk management. A Distinguished Fellow of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance ('Q Group'), Mr. Merton received the Nicholas Molodovsky Award from the Association of Investment Management and Research in 2003.

Professor Merton obtained a B.S. in Engineering Mathematics from Columbia University in 1966, a M.S. in Applied Mathematics from California Institute of Technology in 1967 and a Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He holds honorary degrees from University of Chicago and five foreign universities.

Further information including publications can be found at www.people.hbs.edu/rmerton








Elizabeth Odders-White

Elizabeth Odders-White is an Assistant Professor of Finance, Investment, and Banking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.  She holds a Ph.D. in Finance from Northwestern University, and a B.S. in applied mathematics and a B.F.A. in vocal performance, both from Tulane University.  Her research focuses primarily on the trading of equity securities in U.S. markets.  She has presented papers at many academic conferences, and her work has been published in the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Quantitative and Financial Analysis, and the Journal of Financial Markets.

Rafael Repullo is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Monetary and Financial Studies (CEMFI) in Madrid, Spain. He holds a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics, and has worked in the Department of Economics of the London School of Economics and the Research Department of the Bank of Spain. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a Member of the Council of the European Economic Association. He has been a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England, and has held visiting appointments at the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the London School of Economics, and the Universities of Tel Aviv, Princeton and Pennsylvania. He has been Co-Director of the Financial Economics Program of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London, and he is currently Secretary and Treasurer of the European Standing Committee of the Econometric Society, and Founding Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute, Brussels. He also Associate Editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Journal of Banking and Finance, and the Journal of Financial Services Research.

He has published in journals such as Econometrica, Journal of Economic Theory, Review of Economic Studies, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Intermediation, International Economic Review, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, and Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. His recent research is in the areas of on banking and finance, where he has worked on topics such as venture capital, market liquidity and shareholder activism, insider trading, takeovers of foreign banks, capital requirements and risk-taking in banking, policies for banking crises, the credit channel of monetary policy transmission, and the open market operations of the European Central Bank.







Jean-Charles Rochet

Jean - Charles Rochet is a former student of Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and holds a Ph.D. in Mathematical Economics from Paris – Dauphine University. He has taught in Paris, (ENSAE and Ecole Polytechnique), London, (B.P. visiting professor, London School of Economics, 2001-02) and Toulouse. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 1995. He has also been council member of European Economic Association, and associate editor of Econometrica. He is currently Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Toulouse University and Research director at Institut D’Economie Industrielle. He has written more than 50 articles in international scientific journals (Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Theory, Rand Journal of Economics) and 3 textbooks, including Microeconomics of Banking (with X. FREIXAS) MIT Press (1997). His research interests include platform competition, nonlinear pricing, theory of contracts, banking crises, and solvency regulations for financial institutions.







John Rutherfurd, Jr.

John Rutherfurd, Jr. is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Moody’s Corporation. Mr. Rutherfurd was elected Chairman in October 2003. He was named CEO when the firm became an independent public company in October 2000. Previously, Moody’s was part of The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation.

Moody’s Corporation (NYSE:MCO) is the parent of two companies: Moody’s Investors Service and Moody’s KMV. The firm maintains offices in 18 countries and employs more than 2,300 people worldwide. The corporation reported revenue of $1.2 billion in 2003.

Moody’s Investors Service is among the world’s most respected, widely utilized sources for credit ratings, research and risk analysis. The firm publishes market-leading credit opinions, deal research and commentary; it rates more than 200,000 debt obligations issued by thousands of corporations and governments in 100 nations, totaling more than $30 trillion of debt issued in domestic and international markets. Moody’s KMV is a provider of credit risk management products for banks and investors in credit-sensitive assets, and serves more than 1,500 clients operating in over 80 countries, including most of the world’s largest financial institutions.

Mr. Rutherfurd joined Moody’s Investors Service as Managing Director for New Business Development, a position he held from 1995 to 1996. During that time, Mr. Rutherfurd coordinated certain of the rating agency’s diversification activities. As Chief Administrative Officer from 1996 until 1998, he was responsible for Accounting, Finance, and Information Technology. He was named President of the firm in 1998.
From 1985 to 1989, and again from 1990 to 1995, Mr. Rutherfurd served as president of Interactive Data Corporation (IDC), a leading provider of securities pricing and other data for investment accounting. Dun & Bradstreet acquired IDC from Chase in 1988 and sold the firm to The Financial Times in 1995. Mr. Rutherfurd led the team that successfully improved IDC’s financial performance prior to its sale. He had been one of the firm’s founders in 1968.

From 1989 to 1990, Mr. Rutherfurd served as Executive Vice President of Dun & Bradstreet Financial Information Services (North America), which included IDC and Moody’s Financial Information Services unit.
In September 2001, Mr. Rutherfurd was elected to the board of directors of the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc., where he continues to serve.

Mr. Rutherfurd received a bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University in 1962; he earned a law degree from Harvard University in 1966.

Stephen Schaefer

Stephen Schaefer is Professor of Finance at London Business School. Formerly on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, he has also been a visiting professor at the Universities of British Columbia, California (Berkeley), Chicago, Venice and, most recently, Cape Town. At LBS he has been at various times Research Dean, a Faculty member of the Governing Body, chairman of the finance area and Director of the Institute of Finance and Accounting.

His research interests include the pricing and hedging of fixed income securities and derivatives, risk management and the regulation of financial institutions. His publications include: “Non-Linear Value-at-Risk” (with Mark Britten-Jones), European Finance Review, "The Regulation of Banks and Securities Firms", European Economic Review and "The Term Structure of Real Interest Rates and the Cox, Ingersoll and Ross Model" (with R.H. Brown), Journal of Financial Economics. He currently serves on the editorial board of six professional journals including: the Review of Derivatives Research, the European Finance Review and the Journal of Fixed Income.

Outside academic life, Stephen Schaefer consults for a number of major financial institutions. He is a non-executive director of Leo Fund Management was formerly an Independent Board Member of the Securities and Futures Authority and a Trustee-Director of Smith Breeden Mutual Funds.







Philipp Schonbucher

Dr. Philipp J. Schönbucher is assistant professor of Risk Management at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich). He holds degrees in mathematics (Oxford) and economics (Bonn) and a PhD in economics (Bonn). His publications include papers on credit risk modelling, credit derivatives pricing, stochastic volatility modelling, option pricing in illiquid markets, real options and term structure models. His main area of research is credit risk modelling and credit derivatives pricing in which he has been active since 1996. Furthermore, he is author of a book on “Credit Derivatives Pricing Models” (Wiley Finance, 2003).







Kenneth Singleton

Kenneth Singleton is the C.O.G. Miller Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.
He previously taught in the Economics Department at the University of Virginia and the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon, and held short-term visiting positions at the University of Chicago and University of Tokyo. While on leave from Stanford, in 1991-92, he was a vice president in the Fixed Income Research Department of Goldman Sachs and Co.

His research interests are in econometric methods for estimation and testing of dynamic asset pricing models; modeling of term structures of government and defaultable bond yields; measuring and managing market, credit and liquidity risks; and debt financing in emerging economies.

His professional awards include the Smith-Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize from the Journal of Finance, the Frisch Prize from the Econometric Society and the Irving Fisher Dissertation Award. He was named fellow of the Econometric Society in 1988 and of the Journal of Econometrics in 1998, and has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1982.

Singleton received his bachelor's degree from Reed College, and his master's degree and doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin.







Jeremy C. Stein

Jeremy C. Stein is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he teaches courses in finance in the undergraduate and PhD programs. Before coming to Harvard in 2000, he was for ten years on the finance faculty of M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, most recently as the J.C. Penney Professor of Management. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Harvard Business School from 1987- 1990. He received his AB in economics summa cum laude from Princeton University in1983 and his PhD in economics from M.I.T. in 1986.

Stein was a Marvin Bower Fellow at the Harvard Business School in 1999-2000. He spent 1989-1990 as a Senior Staff Economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers. In 1987, he served on the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms (a.k.a. the Brady Commission). In 1986-1987, he worked at the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs and Co. He has also done consulting or executive education work for a number of companies. While at M.I.T, he was a four-time recipient of the Sloan School's Excellence in Teaching prize, and in 1998 was elected winner of Sloan's Alumni Award for Excellence in Management Education (“Teacher of the Year”).

Stein’s research has covered such topics as: behavioral finance and stock-market efficiency; corporate investment and financing decisions; risk management; capital allocation inside firms; financial intermediation; and monetary policy. He has served on the editorial boards of several leading economics and finance journals, including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Financial Economics, as well as on the board of directors of the American Finance Association. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Roger M. Stein

Roger M. Stein is Managing Director of Research at Moody’s KMV in New York, with responsibility for the development of a wide range of quantitative credit risk models. He is also a founding chair of Moody’s Academic Advisory and Research Committee, a group of leading academics in finance who focus on credit issues and opine on Moody’s quantitative research.

Mr. Stein has been working at Moody’s in the field of mathematical and statistical modeling for the past 15 years. He headed up Moody’s early efforts to apply quantitative and predictive modeling to credit analysis and prior to that, spent several years as an analyst in Moody’s Structured Finance group. His current areas of research include credit modeling, trading system development, analysis of large-scale simulations, and methodologies for validating the predictive power quantitative models.

Mr. Stein has an undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton where he majored in Mathematics and Japanese Studies. He has a Master’s degree and Ph.D. from New York University and studied at the Santa Fe Institute.

Mr. Stein is a frequent lecturer and instructor at the NYU Stern School of Business and has authored articles and research papers on a variety of financial, statistics and other topics. He has served on the editorial boards of several journals and is the co-author of Seven Methods for Transforming Corporate Data into Business Intelligence (Prentice Hall).

Stuart M. Turnbull

Stuart M. Turnbull, Bauer Chair, Professor of Finance, the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, 2003.

Stuart M. Turnbull has authored over fifty academic papers in the areas of financial economics, law and economics, and the general area of derivatives. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Mathematical Finance, International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance, and the Journal of Derivatives. He has published two books on derivatives. His book with Robert A. Jarrow, Derivative Securities, is a standard in the industry, providing a simple, unified approach to the world of derivative securities. Their paper, “Pricing Derivatives on Financial Securities Subject to Credit Risk,” is cited repeatedly in credit modeling research and is the second most viewed abstract on defaultrisk.com. The Jarrow-Turnbull reduced form pricing methodology is the standard framework used for pricing credit derivatives and for credit risk management.

Most recently as Senior Vice President, Fixed Income Research, Lehman Brothers, New York, Dr. Turnbull worked on counterparty risk modeling, pricing credit default swaps, forward default premiums, and risk modeling. Prior to joining Lehman Brothers, he was Vice President, Risk Management Division, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Toronto, Ontario, where he worked on developing the next generation of credit and market risk management models and performance measurement.

Oldrich Alfons Vasicek

Oldrich is a founding partner of KMV Corporation and currently advises Moody's KMV. In his early career, he was a Vice President in the Management Science Department of Wells Fargo Bank. His academic career includes teaching graduate finance at the University of Rochester, the University of California at Berkeley and at Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales (ESSEC) in France. A native of the Czech Republic, he holds a Ph.D. in probability theory from Charles University in Prague. Oldrich works in mathematical finance, particularly on development of quantitative models of firms, financial instruments and financial markets. His work is extensively cited and used in applications. He has published over 30 articles in financial and mathematical journals and has received a number of honors, including the Graham and Dodd Award, the Roger F. Murray Prize, the Award of the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance and the Risk Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been inducted into the Derivatives Strategy Hall of Fame, the Fixed Income Analysts Society Hall of Fame and the Risk Hall of Fame. His equilibrium model of the term structure of interest rates is generally recognized as a genesis of this field in finance.







Alan White

Alan White has been on the faculty at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto since 1987. He is well known for his work with Rotman Professor John Hull concerning the development of the Hull-White interest rate model and associated numerical procedures. This model is widely used by financial institutions in trading rooms around the world to value nonstandard interest rate derivatives. His research is principally in the area of derivative securities, their pricing and their use by financial institutions for risk management. Recently his research has been focused on the pricing and management of credit risk. Prof. White earned his Ph.D. from the U of T, his M.B.A. from McMaster University and his B.Eng. from McGill University.

Prof. White has made numerous contributions to the academic community publishing in both academic and practitioner journals. At the Rotman School he has taught at the graduate level and served as the supervisor of the Finance Ph.D. program. Professor White was recently appointed as the first holder of the Peter L. Mitchelson / Sit Investment Associates Foundation Chair in Investment Strategy.







Fan Yu

Fan Yu joined the Graduate School of Management at UC-Irvine as an assistant professor of finance in 1999 after receiving his PhD in Economics from Cornell University. Prior to his career as a financial economist he had studied physics at Nanjing, McMaster and Harvard Universities. Recently he has worked on the modeling of default correlation and default risk premium, as well as the role of imperfect accounting information in the valuation of corporate bonds and exchange-traded stock options. His work was accepted for publication in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, Mathematical Finance, and the Journal of Fixed Income.