Crisis Wasted? Leading Risk Managers on Risk Culture

7 Carol Alexander

Brighton, 27 November 2014

Risk managers need to be better trained and better rewarded. Risk takers need to be held more accountable. Some of this is happening.

Carol Alexander is Professor of Finance at the University of Sussex and Managing Editor, with Geert Bekaert, of the Journal of Banking and Finance.

She talks about what still needs to be achieved in Risk Management.

Carol Alexander:

My academic background, briefly, is undergraduate in maths with experimental psychology and a PhD at Sussex in algebraic number theory supervised by Walter Ledermann,¹ followed by post-doctoral work in Amsterdam with Hendrik Lenstra² and then a move back to London. There were very few jobs in algebra so I worked for Phillips and Drew (later UBS). In the early 1980s I programmed BBC micro-computers³ and wrote a paper on the valuation of index-linked gilts using inflation forecasts. Then I returned to academia at the London School of Economics studying for a masters in mathematical economics and econometrics, which included time-series analysis with James Durbin⁴ and Andrew Harvey,⁵ and game theory with Ken Binmore,⁶ Avner Shaked⁷ and John Sutton.⁸ There I met some famous economists, including Willem Buiter,⁹ Charlie Bean¹⁰ and Mervyn King¹¹ and worked as research assistant for some members of the Monetary Policy Committee:¹² Stephen Nickell¹³ and Richard Layard.¹⁴ I also learned about GARCH¹⁵ and co-integration from Rob Engle.¹⁶

Then I moved back to Sussex as a lecturer ...