Haipeng Xing

Tze Leung Lai

The idea of writing this bookarosein 2000when the ?rst author wasassigned to teach the required course STATS 240 (Statistical Methods in Finance) in the new M. S. program in ?nancial mathematics at Stanford, which is an interdisciplinary program that aims to provide a master’s-level education in applied mathematics, statistics, computing, ?nance, and economics. Students in the programhad di?erent backgroundsin statistics. Some had only taken a basic course in statistical inference, while others had taken a broad spectrum of M. S. - and Ph. D. -level statistics courses. On the other hand, all of them had already taken required core courses in investment theory and derivative pricing, and STATS 240 was supposed to link the theory and pricing formulas to real-world data and pricing or investment strategies. Besides students in theprogram,thecoursealso attractedmanystudentsfromother departments in the university, further increasing the heterogeneity of students, as many of them had a strong background in mathematical and statistical modeling from the mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences but no previous experience in ?nance. To address the diversity in background but common strong interest in the subject and in a potential career as a “quant” in the ?nancialindustry,thecoursematerialwascarefullychosennotonlytopresent basic statistical methods of importance to quantitative ?nance but also to summarize domain knowledge in ?nance and show how it can be combined with statistical modeling in ?nancial analysis and decision making. The course material evolved over the years, especially after the second author helped as the head TA during the years 2004 and 2005.

Statistical Models and Methods for Financial Markets

Chris Chatfield

This new edition of this classic title, now in its seventh edition, presents a balanced and comprehensive introduction to the theory, implementation, and practice of time series analysis. The book covers a wide range of topics, including ARIMA models, forecasting methods, spectral analysis, linear systems, state-space models, the Kalman filters, nonlinear models, volatility models, and multivariate models. It also presents many examples and implementations of time series models and methods to reflect advances in the field. Highlights of the seventh edition: A new chapter on univariate volatility models A revised chapter on linear time series models A new section on multivariate volatility models A new section on regime switching models Many new worked examples, with R code integrated into the text The book can be used as a textbook for an undergraduate or a graduate level time series course in statistics. The book does not assume many prerequisites in probability and statistics, so it is also intended for students and data analysts in engineering, economics, and finance.

An Introduction with R

The Analysis of Time Series

Xiaobo Zhang

Inspired by the wide adoption of rigorous randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in medical research, economists and other social scientists have increasingly used RCTs in their research. As researchers pick up projects amenable to the RCT methodology, they likely leave out important questions to which RCTs cannot be directly applied. As a result, RCTs have been criticized for the proclivity of addressing trivial questions. As a matter of fact, in medical research RCTs are an integral part of adaptive sequential experiment designa few steps must be taken to screen out drugs that have toxins and strong side effects before running any RCTs on humans. In this paper, we argue that economists can learn a great deal from the design principles implemented in medical research. We develop a theoretical model to show the logic of adaptive sequential experiment design in the presence of uncertainty over negative effects and discuss how to choose samples in a population to minimize the experiment cost. We also point out the applications of our proposed framework in the economic domain, such as economic reforms and new product design.

Haipeng Xing

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