Neil Shephard

Last updated

Neil Shephard
Shephard, Neil (1964).jpeg
Born (1964-10-08) 8 October 1964 (age 58)
Education University of York
London School of Economics
Known for auxiliary particle filter, realised variance, bipower variation
SpouseDr Heather Bell
Awards Guy Medal in Silver, 2017
Richard Stone Prize, 2012
Scientific career
Fields econometrics, statistics, finance
Institutions London School of Economics
Nuffield College, Oxford
Harvard University
Website scholar.harvard.edu/shephard/home

Neil Shephard (born 8 October 1964), FBA, is an econometrician, currently Frank B. Baird Jr., Professor of Science in the Department of Economics and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University.

Contents

His most well known contributions are: (i) the formalisation of the econometrics of realised volatility, which nonparametrically estimates the volatility of asset prices, (ii) the introduction of the auxiliary particle filter (signal extraction), (iii) the nonparametric identification of jumps in financial economics, through multipower variation, (iv) stochastic volatility models based on non-Gaussian Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, known as 'Barndorff-Nielsen-Shephard' models.

Early life and education

Neil Shephard was born in Plymouth, England, but moved to Norfolk, England, aged one. His mother was Tydfil Shephard (1930-1972), who was a high school teacher. His father was Tom Shephard (1930-2023), who was a Norfolk high school head. Since 1975 Gillian Shephard has been his step-mother. He attended the Marshland High School West Walton, King Edward VII Grammar School in King's Lynn and 1981-1983 City of Norwich School (he studied pure mathematics & statistics, economics and politics at A-level). He studied economics and statistics as an undergraduate at the University of York in the UK 1983-1986, awarded a first class degree with distinction. He did his M.Sc. (awarded in 1987, with distinction) and Ph.D. (examined in 1989 and graduated in 1990) at the LSE.

Academic career

He was a lecturer in statistics at the LSE from 1988 to 1993. He moved to Nuffield College, Oxford in 1991 to join the economics group as the Gatsby Prize Research Fellow in Econometrics (funded by the Gatsby Foundation). In 1993 he became an Official Fellow in Economics at Nuffield College, Oxford. He has been Professor of Economics and of Statistics at Harvard University since 2013.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006, a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2004. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in economics by Aarhus University in 2009, the 2012 Richard Stone Prize in Applied Econometrics and the 2017 Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society.

With David F. Hendry he founded the Econometrics Journal in 1998. With Colin Mayer he founded Oxford University's Masters in Financial Economics. In 2007 he co-founded the Oxford-Man Institute, which he directed from 2007 to 2011. He chaired the Statistics Department at Harvard from 2015 to 2022. With Computer Science and Statistical colleagues, he founded Harvard University's Masters in Data Science in 2018 and the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

Publications

Representative articles

Edited volumes

Related Research Articles

Herman Ole Andreas Wold was a Norwegian-born econometrician and statistician who had a long career in Sweden. Wold was known for his work in mathematical economics, in time series analysis, and in econometric statistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Information geometry</span> Technique in statistics

Information geometry is an interdisciplinary field that applies the techniques of differential geometry to study probability theory and statistics. It studies statistical manifolds, which are Riemannian manifolds whose points correspond to probability distributions.

Jerry Allen Hausman is the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a notable econometrician. He has published numerous influential papers in microeconometrics. Hausman is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the John Bates Clark Medal in 1985 and the Frisch Medal in 1980.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert F. Engle</span> American economist

Robert Fry Engle III is an American economist and statistician. He won the 2003 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sharing the award with Clive Granger, "for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH)".

In finance, volatility clustering refers to the observation, first noted by Mandelbrot (1963), that "large changes tend to be followed by large changes, of either sign, and small changes tend to be followed by small changes." A quantitative manifestation of this fact is that, while returns themselves are uncorrelated, absolute returns or their squares display a positive, significant and slowly decaying autocorrelation function: corr(|rt|, |rt+τ |) > 0 for τ ranging from a few minutes to several weeks. This empirical property has been documented in the 90's by Granger and Ding (1993) and Ding and Granger (1996) among others; see also. Some studies point further to long-range dependence in volatility time series, see Ding, Granger and Engle (1993) and Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard.

Financial econometrics is the application of statistical methods to financial market data. Financial econometrics is a branch of financial economics, in the field of economics. Areas of study include capital markets, financial institutions, corporate finance and corporate governance. Topics often revolve around asset valuation of individual stocks, bonds, derivatives, currencies and other financial instruments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Cox (statistician)</span> British statistician and educator (1924–2022)

Sir David Roxbee Cox was a British statistician and educator. His wide-ranging contributions to the field of statistics included introducing logistic regression, the proportional hazards model and the Cox process, a point process named after him.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lars Peter Hansen</span> American economist

Lars Peter Hansen is an American economist. He is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the Booth School of Business, at the University of Chicago and a 2013 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Christian Gouriéroux is an econometrician who holds a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics from the University of Rouen. He has the Professor exceptional level title from France. Gouriéroux is now a professor at University of Toronto and CREST, Paris [Center for Research in Economics and Statistics].

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ole Barndorff-Nielsen</span> Danish statistician (1935–2022)

Ole Eiler Barndorff-Nielsen was a Danish statistician who has contributed to many areas of statistical science.

Sir David Forbes Hendry, FBA CStat is a British econometrician, currently a professor of economics and from 2001 to 2007 was head of the economics department at the University of Oxford. He is also a professorial fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.

In finance, a volatility swap is a forward contract on the future realised volatility of a given underlying asset. Volatility swaps allow investors to trade the volatility of an asset directly, much as they would trade a price index. Its payoff at expiration is equal to

Peter Reinhard Hansen is the Henry A. Latané Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has previously taught at Brown University, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and the European University Institute.

In financial econometrics, the Markov-switching multifractal (MSM) is a model of asset returns developed by Laurent E. Calvet and Adlai J. Fisher that incorporates stochastic volatility components of heterogeneous durations. MSM captures the outliers, log-memory-like volatility persistence and power variation of financial returns. In currency and equity series, MSM compares favorably with standard volatility models such as GARCH(1,1) and FIGARCH both in- and out-of-sample. MSM is used by practitioners in the financial industry to forecast volatility, compute value-at-risk, and price derivatives.

The methodology of econometrics is the study of the range of differing approaches to undertaking econometric analysis.

Realized variance or realised variance is the sum of squared returns. For instance the RV can be the sum of squared daily returns for a particular month, which would yield a measure of price variation over this month. More commonly, the realized variance is computed as the sum of squared intraday returns for a particular day.

The realized kernel (RK) is an estimator of volatility. The estimator is typically computed with high frequency return data, such as second-by-second returns. Unlike the realized variance, the realized kernel is a robust estimator of volatility, in the sense that the realized kernel estimates the appropriate volatility quantity, even when the returns are contaminated with noise.

Whitney Kent Newey is the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a well-known econometrician. He is best known for developing, with Kenneth D. West, the Newey–West estimator, which robustly estimates the covariance matrix of a regression model when errors are heteroskedastic and autocorrelated.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yacine Aït-Sahalia</span>

Yacine Aït-Sahalia is the Otto Hack 1903 Professor of Finance and Economics at Princeton University. His primary area of research is financial econometrics. He has been serving as the inaugural director of the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University from 1998 until 2014. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor (1993–96), associate professor (1996–98) and professor of finance (1998) at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Siddhartha Chib is an econometrician and statistician, the Harry C. Hartkopf Professor of Econometrics and Statistics at Washington University in St. Louis. His work is primarily in Bayesian statistics, econometrics, and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.

References