Professor Karim Abadir's Inaugural Lecture

Wednesday saw the excellent inaugural lecture of Professor Karim Abadir, one of Tanaka Business School's rising stars.

Drawing on his years' of research experience in Econometrics & Statistics, Financial Markets, Macroeconomics, and Applied Mathematics, the intrigued crowd listened studiously as Professor Abadir regaled them with his lecture entitled "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics?"

Professor Abadir explained that reliable data analysis is one of the hardest tasks in sciences and social sciences. In his opinion, misleading and sometimes puzzling results arise when the analysis is done without regard for the special features of the data. Through his lecture, he focused on the design of new statistical tools to deal with some prominent questions in Finance and Economics. In particular, he spoke about ways of characterizing the randomness of variables, when motivated by a problem in the pricing of financial options and also the relations between interest rates on different maturities, now and in the future; the "term structure of interest rates". Then, in an explosive finale, he discussed modelling the unconventional nonlinear long-memory dynamics that arise from a general-equilibrium economic model, and their implications for exchange rates, stock market indexes, and all macroeconomic variables.