Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of the biggest challenges to modern medicine. However, before February 2021, the last AD drug approval occurred in 2003, implying a 100% failure rate of AD therapeutic programs over the 17 years to that point; the lowest probability of success among all diseases. One of the key challenges is funding, which we explore in more depth in this chapter by first reviewing the current funding landscape for AD, and then considering the strengths and weaknesses of various commercialization strategies. Despite the discouraging track record of the biopharma industry in addressing AD, there is reason to be hopeful due to substantial scientific progress in developing a deeper understanding of the biology of the disease as well as increased federal funding for AD research. However, we also we need the private sector to translate these scientific breakthroughs into new medicines, which takes additional funding and new business models so as to reduce risk and improve returns for investors. If we can change the narrative of AD therapeutics to give investors new hope, the private sector can serve as a powerful partner to the biomedical community.

The non-trading or non-synchronous effect arises when time series, usually financial asset prices, are taken to be recorded at time intervals of one length when in fact they are recorded at time intervals of another, possibly irregular, lengths. For example, the daily prices of securities quoted in the financial press are usually "closing" prices, prices at which the last transaction in each of those securities occurred on the previous business day. these closing prices generally  do not occur at the same time each day, but by calling them "daily" prices, we have implicitly and incorrectly assumes that they are equally spaces at 24-hour intervals. Such an assumption can generate spurious predictability in price changes and returns even if true price changes or returns are statistically independent. The non-trading effect induces potentially serious biases in the moments and co-moments of asset returns such as their means, variances, covariances, and autocorrelation and cross-autocorrelation coefficients.

A securities transactions tax is likely to have far-reaching and profound implications for the financial systems and institutions. We evaluate the effect that a transactions tax will have on the financial system's role in transferring resources over time and in allocating risk efficiently across individuals and sectors. In particular, we examine the impact of a transactions tax on individual investors due to the reduction in the rate of return on savings, the reduction in trading, and the likely reduction in the value of stocks. We also consider the possible effects of a transactions tax on market liquidity. By reducing the informational role of prices and reducing market liquidity, a transactions tax may result in higher market volatility. We provide a simple numerical example that illustrates the enormous impact such a tax will have on the derivatives markets, where participants rely heavily on dynamic trading strategies to control risk. This sector of the financial system, along with its jobs, revenues, and risk-management capabilities are likely to move offshore in response to the tax.

Ever since the Great Recession, the global financial regulatory system has undergone significant changes. But have these changes been sufficient? Have they created a new problem of over-regulation? Is the system currently in a better position than in the pre-Recession years, or have we not adequately addressed the basic causes of the financial crisis and resulting Great Recession These were the questions and issues addressed in the seventeenth annual international banking conference held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in November 2014. In collaboration with the Bank of England, the theme of the conference was to examine the state of the new global financial system as it has evolved in response to significant market changes and regulatory reforms triggered by the global financial crisis. The papers from that conference are collected in this volume, with contributions from an international array of government officials, regulators, industry practitioners and academics.

Intelligence does not arise only in individual brains; it also arises in groups of individuals. This is collective intelligence: groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. In recent years, a new kind of collective intelligence has emerged: interconnected groups of people and computers, collectively doing intelligent things. Today these groups are engaged in tasks that range from writing software to predicting the results of presidential elections. This volume reports on the latest research in the study of collective intelligence, laying out a shared set of research challenges from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Taken together, these essays—by leading researchers from such fields as computer science, biology, economics, and psychology—lay the foundation for a new multidisciplinary field.

Pioneered by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Harry Markowitz over half a century ago, portfolio theory is one of the oldest branches of modern financial economics. It addresses the fundamental question faced by an investor: how should money best be allocated across a number of possible investment choices? That is, what collection or portfolio of financial assets should be chosen? In this article, we describe the fundamentals of portfolio theory and methods for its practical implementation. We focus on a fixed time horizon for investment, which we generally take to be a year, but the period may be as short as days or as long as several years. We summarize many important innovations over the past several decades, including techniques for better understanding how financial prices behave, robust methods for estimating input parameters, Bayesian methods, and resampling techniques.

Historical accounts of financial crises suggest that fear and greed are the common denominators of these disruptive events: periods of unchecked greed eventually lead to excessive leverage and unsustainable asset-price levels, and the inevitable collapse results in unbridled fear, which must subside before any recovery is possible. The cognitive neurosciences may provide some new insights into this boom/bust pattern through a deeper understanding of the dynamics of emotion and human behavior. In this chapter, I describe some recent research from the neurosciences literature on fear and reward learning, mirror neurons, theory of mind, and the link between emotion and rational behavior. By exploring the neuroscientific basis of cognition and behavior, we may be able to identify more fundamental drivers of financial crises, and improve our models and methods for dealing with them.

Data-snooping—finding seemingly significant but in fact spurious patterns in the data—is a serious problem in financial analysis. Although it afflicts all non-experimental sciences, data-snooping is particularly problematic for financial analysis because of the large number of empirical studies performed on the same datasets. Given enough time, enough attempts, and enough imagination, almost any pattern can be teased out of any dataset. In some cases, these spurious patterns are statistically small, almost unnoticeable in isolation. But because small effects in financial calculations can often lead to very large differences in investment performance, data-snooping biases can be surprisingly substantial. In this review article, I provide several examples of data-snooping biases, explain why it is impossible to eliminate them completely, and propose several ways to guard against the most extreme forms of data-snooping in financial analysis.

The pricing of options, certificates, and other derivatives or assets—financial assets whose payments depend on the prices of other assets—is one of the great successes of modern financial economics. Although the pricing of derivatives is computationally intensive, there is little done in terms of the traditional empirical analysis since by the very nature of the determination of prices and arbitrage there is no error term to minimize. There are, however, many issues of statistical inference that affect the pricing of options and other derivatives. This paper analyzes two of the most common issues neglected in the literature: reduced form empirical instruments for the determination of prices and how to use Monte Carlo simulations to calculate option prices depend on a path.

Although they are only one of the many types of statistical tools for modeling nonlinear relationships, neural networks seem to be surrounded by a great deal of mystique and, sometimes, misunderstanding. Because they have their roots in neurophysiology and the cognitive sciences, neural networks are often assumed to have brain-like qualities: learning capacity, problem-solving abilities, and ultimately, cognition and self-awareness. Alternatively, neural networks are often viewed as "black boxes" that can yield accurate predictions with little modeling effort. In this review paper, I hope to remove some of the mystique and misunderstandings about neural networks by providing some simple examples of what they are, what they can and cannot do, and where neural nets might be profitably applied in financial contexts.