Third informal speaker series event with Professor Osler this Wednesday 11/20

iBEAF is excited to announce the third event in our informal speaker series scheduled for Wednesday 11/20 at 12:30-1:30PM in the Chancellor's Suite, where we will be bringing in Brandeis University and IBS faculty members interested in behavioral economics and finance to talk about anything and everything to do with the subject. The informal nature of these meetings means they will evolve based on your questions and areas of interest. The faculty member is interested in talking about what you wish to hear about.

Next up on our schedule is Professor Carol Osler, Professor of Finance in the Brandeis International Business School. In addition to being the Program Director for the MAief program she is also iBEAF’s faculty advisor. This meeting provides an excellent opportunity for students to meet Professor Osler on a more personal level and hear about why she is passionate about Behavioral Economics and Finance.

Her specializations include Currency Market Microstructure, Exchange Rate Dynamics, Financial Markets and Open Economy Macroeconomics.

Osler's research focuses on currency trading and exchange rates, research that is best represented by her recent survey of the literature. She has been fascinated by the market since visiting Citibank's trading floor in 1986 and serving as Visiting Economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Foreign Exchange Trading Desk in the early 1990s.

The goal of currency market microstructure research is to develop better models of short-run exchange-rate dynamics, an effort to which Osler and co-authors have contributed. Current working papers provide a new theory of price discovery in currency markets, show that large foreign exchange dealing banks are better informed than small banks, and identify hedge funds as the main source of private information.

While working in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Research Department in the early 1990s, Osler noticed that bursting asset-price bubbles were dampening investment. This same pattern was bringing sluggish recovery from the 1991 recession not only in the U.S. but in many other developed countries. These observations led to joint papers with colleague Matthew Higgins on Asset Market Hangovers and Economic Growth.

While at the New York Fed, Osler also investigated technical trading. She tested specific trading signals such as the head-and-shoulders pattern and support and resistance levels. In addition, she identified order clustering as a potential source of the predictive power of certain strategies.

She taught at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College before joining the New York Fed. Osler has also taught at Columbia University and the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.

Degrees:

Princeton University, Ph.D.
Swarthmore College, B.A.

Her list of published works include, but is not limited to:

Osler, Carol L. "“The Microstructure of Currency Markets,." Market Microstructure in Emerging and Developed Markets,. Ed. Kent Baker and Halil Kiymaz, Eds.. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013 (forthcoming)

Osler, Carol L. "Survival of Overconfidence in Currency Markets”." Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. (2011). (forthcoming)

Osler, Carol L. "Book Review: The Exchange Rate in a Behavioral Finance Framework." Journal of International Economics (2007). (forthcoming)

Osler, Carol L; Jennifer Bender; David Simon. "Noise Trading and Illusory Correlations in U.S. Equity Markets." Review of Finance 17. 2 (2013): 625-652.

Osler, Carol L. "Asymmetric Information and the Foreign-Exchange Trades of Global Custodial Banks." Sixth Annual Central Bank Workshop on the Microstructure of Financial Markets, New York, New York. October 7, 2010.

Osler, Carol L. "Price Discovery in Currency Markets." Journal of International Money and Finance 30. 8 (2011): 1696-1718.

Osler, Carol L. "Liquidity Dynamics in Limit Order Markets Under Asymmetric Information." Journal of Banking and Finance 34. 11 (2010): 2665-2677.

Osler,Carol L. "Currency Orders and the Predictive Success of Technical Analysis." Journal of Finance (2003).

Second informal speaker series event with Professor Ebert this Tuesday 11/12

iBEAF is excited to announce the second event in our informal speaker series, where we will be bringing in Brandeis University and IBS faculty members interested in behavioral economics and finance to talk about anything and everything to do with the subject. The first meeting was a smashing success all around, so we are delighted to be continuing the series. The informal nature of these meetings means they will evolve based on your questions and areas of interest. The faculty member is interested in talking about what you wish to hear about.

Next up on our schedule is Professor Jane Ebert, Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Brandeis International Business School. She is also affiliated with the Department of Psychology.

Her specializations include Consumer judgment and decision-making, affect and emotion,
temporal discounting, and health promotion.

Her research examines in what ways people are (and can be) motivated by future concerns versus more immediate concerns. In one line of research she examines people’s pursuit of and focus on future rewards and goals. This includes understanding the motivation of rewards or goals that occur in the future (such as future monetary rewards or health goals), examining the impact of attention to future goals in challenging circumstances (such as the impact of maintaining a future focus for CEO successors in financially distressed firms), and exploring novel approaches to motivate consumers (such as identifying optimal times for interventions to change health behaviors). In a second line of research, on hedonic prediction, she examines when and why people mispredict their future feelings, and so may be mistaken about their future desires or goals. Her research has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Management Science, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Degrees:
Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Psychology from Harvard University.

B.A. in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

Her list of published works include, but is not limited to:

Ebert, J.E.J. "The surprisingly low motivational power of future rewards: Comparing conventional money-based measures of discounting with motivation-based measures." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 111. (2010): 71-92.

Ebert, J.E.J., Gilbert, D.T., & Wilson, T.D. "Forecasting and backcasting: Predicting the impact of events on the future." Journal of Consumer Research 36. (2009): 353-366.

Cole, C.A., Laurent, G., Drolet, A, Ebert, J.E.J., Gutchess, A., Lambert-Pandraud, R., Mullet, E., Norton, M.I., Peters, E. "Decision Making and Brand Choice by Older Consumers." Marketing Letters 19. (2008): 355-365.

Ebert, J.E.J., & Prelec, D. "The fragility of time: Time-insensitivity and valuation of the near and far future." Management Science 53. (2007): 1423-1438.
Gilbert, D., & Ebert, J.E.J. "Decisions and revisions: The affective forecasting of changeable outcomes." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82. (2002): 503-514.

Ebert, J.E.J. "The role of cognitive resources in the valuation of near and far future events." Acta Psychologica 108. (2001): 155-71.