Research
Bisias, Dimitrios, Mark Flood, Andrew W. Lo, and Stavros Valavanis (2012), A Survey of Systemic Risk Analytics, Annual Review of Financial Economics 4 (1), 255–296.
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We provide a survey of 31 quantitative measures of systemic risk in the economics and finance literature, chosen to span key themes and issues in systemic risk measurement and management. We motivate these measures from the supervisory, research, and data perspectives in the main text, and present concise definitions of each risk measure--including required inputs, expected outputs, and data requirements--in an extensive appendix. To encourage experimentation and innovation among as broad an audience as possible, we have developed open-source Matlab code for most of the analytics surveyed, available for download above.
Fagnan, David E., Austin A. Gromatzky, Roger M. Stein, Jose-Maria Fernandez, and Andrew W. Lo (2014), Financing Drug Discovery for Orphan Diseases, Drug Discovery Today 19 (5), 533–538.
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Fernandez, Jose-Maria, Roger M. Stein, and Andrew W. Lo (2012), Commercializing Biomedical Research through Securitization Techniques, Nature Biotechnology 30 (10), 964–975.
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Biomedical innovation has become riskier, more expensive and more difficult to finance with traditional sources such as private and public equity. Here we propose a financial structure in which a large number of biomedical programs at various stages of development are funded by a single entity to substantially reduce the portfolio's risk. The portfolio entity can finance its activities by issuing debt, a critical advantage because a much large pool of capital is available for investment in debt versus equity. By employing financial engineering techniques such as securitization, it can raise even greater amounts of more-patient capital. In a simulation using historical data for new molecular entities in oncology from 1990 to 2011, we find that megafunds of $5-15 billion may yield average investment returns of 8.9-11.4% for equity holders and 5-8% for 'research-backed obligation' holders, which are lower than typical venture-capital hurdle rates by attractive to pension funds, insurance companies and other large institutional investors. Open-source software available for download in link above.
