This is an abridged version of an MIT Sloan School of Management lecture delivered online by Prof. Andrew W. Lo to students in his 15.481 class "Financial Market Dynamics and Human Behavior" on March 31, 2020.

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Bloomberg View columnist Barry Ritholtz interviews Andrew Lo, director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering and the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Lo holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale University and a doctorate in economics from Harvard University. This commentary aired on Bloomberg Radio.

Andrew W. Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named winner of the top $2,500 prize in the Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Awards. Mr. Lo, a professor of finance at the Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, was honored for his article “What is an Index?”

Healthcare Finance, a new course to be taught by Andrew W. Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor, a Professor of Finance, and Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT Sloan, will cover the role of finance in the healthcare industry. It will emphasize the application of novel financing methods to facilitate drug discovery, clinical development, and greater patient access to transformative high-cost therapies.

Andrew Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who has been on the MIT faculty since 1988, last year accepted a secondary appointment in EECS and became a primary investigator in CSAIL. Recently, Lo has used techniques borrowed from computer science to mine credit-bureau data and data about the transactions conducted by customers of financial institutions to more accurately predict the risk of default or delinquency. Lo is one of the researchers at bigdata@CSAIL, a new initiative led by professor of computer science and engineering Sam Madden.

MIT economist Andrew Lo set out to review a couple books about the financial crisis. Those books led to a couple more books, which led — you see where this is going — to 17 more books. Now, Lo is about to publish "Reading About The Financial Crisis: A 21 Book Review."

Andrew Lo, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, was asked by the Journal of Economic Literature to write a review of three or four of the more important academic books on the crisis. The initial sample, he thought, was too small. There were lots of useful books on the topic, from journalists as well as academics. Widening the spectrum would also highlight areas of disagreement between authors.

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) welcomed its first full-time member from the MIT Sloan School of Management: Andrew Lo. While the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence may seem atypical for the work of an economist, Lo feels that joining CSAIL is a natural extension of the research path he has forged for many years.

It was announced that MIT Professor Andrew Lo was selected to serve on The Clearing House's Academic Advisory Council (AAC), which pairs distinguished scholars from the nation's top academic institutions with leaders from the financial industry to analyze key issues facing the global financial system.

"Maybe we should provide more government support for financial PhDs, as we already do for engineers, so the pay scales would seem less skewed and government service not look such a poor choice," says MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo.

MIT Sloan's Andrew Lo received the first Market Technicians Association Educational Foundation (MTAEF) Mike Epstein Award in honor of his long-term support of technical analysis in academia and practice.

MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo of MIT's Sloan School of Management points out that in the physical sciences three laws can explain 99% of behavior, whereas in finance 99 laws can explain at best 3% of behavior.

When a bridge over a river collapses, the engineers who built the bridge have to take responsibility. But typically, critics call for improvement and smarter, better-trained engineers—not fewer of them. The same pattern seems to apply to financial engineers. At MIT, the Sloan School of Management is starting a one-year master's in finance this fall because the field has become too complex to be adequately covered as part of a traditional MBA program, and because of student demand. The new finance program, MIT Sloan Prof. Andrew Lo noted, had 179 applicants for 25 places.

Some people are blaming the economic crisis on financial engineering and business school education. Similar to how the 1986 space shuttle disaster cannot be blamed on aerospace engineering, it is inaccurate to blame the crisis on technical know-how. Rather, the misuse of technology and poor judgment are to blame. Initial evidence about the current crisis suggests that executives at financial institutions did not deem risk assessments to be important. This suggests a lack of judgment, understanding, and training. As financial markets become more complex, it is becoming harder for conventional, two-year MBA programs to sufficiently train MBA candidates. But education beyond this level typically gets no support from the federal government, unlike other engineering fields. The Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts of Institute of Technology awarded only four PhDs in finance in 2007, similar to other top business schools. To foster greater expertise, it is important to offer scholarships in financial engineering that could be paid for by a small
tax on derivatives transactions. By sufficiently training future leaders to handle financial system risks, it will become easier to withstand financial crises.