My name is Jim Garven. I currently hold appointments at Baylor University as the Frank S. Groner Memorial Chair of Finance and Professor of Finance & Insurance. I also currently serve as an associate editor for Geneva Risk and Insurance Review.
At Baylor, I teach courses in managerial economics, risk management, and financial engineering, and my research interests are in corporate risk management, insurance economics, and option pricing theory and applications.
Please email your comments about this weblog to James_Garven@baylor.edu.
“Intrade said it would no longer accept bets made by U.S. residents, a move that came just hours after U.S. regulators filed a civil complaint against the company over its commodities-focused markets.” It will be interesting to see the impact that this will have upon the level of interest in and reliability of prediction markets for US-centric events, which make up the lion’s share of Intrade contract offerings.
Quoting from this article, “The efficient markets hypothesis is surely false. What is striking is that it is very close to being true. For the Warren Buffetts of the world, “almost true” is not true at all. For the rest of us, beating the market remains an elusive dream.”
The Human Toll of Violence in Gaza, Israel – The Numbers Guy – WSJ.
“Bombings in Gaza, and rocket attacks on Israel, leave death in their wake — as well as questions about how to count, categorize and interpret the casualty counts.”
Quoting from this article, “ON THE face of it, economics has had a dreadful decade: it offered no prediction of the subprime or euro crises, and only bitter arguments over how to solve them. But alongside these failures, a small group of the world’s top microeconomists are quietly revolutionising the discipline. Working for big technology firms such as Google, Microsoft and eBay, they are changing the way business decisions are made and markets work.”
Economics: Micro stars, macro effects | The Economist.
Quoting from this article, “ON THE face of it, economics has had a dreadful decade: it offered no prediction of the subprime or euro crises, and only bitter arguments over how to solve them. But alongside these failures, a small group of the world’s top microeconomists are quietly revolutionising the discipline. Working for big technology firms such as Google, Microsoft and eBay, they are changing the way business decisions are made and markets work.”]]>
Mr. Gates raises a number of interesting points about “…our shockingly low (college) graduation rates” – too bad he resorted to PowerPoint to make them!
Fascinating parsing of the data from the New Family Structures Study (NFSS) by UT-Austin sociology professor Mark Regnerus on the relationships between politics, religion, and sex…