"The Future of Finance" - EDHEC Speaker Series
EDHEC SPEAKER SERIES
“LE FUTUR DE LA FINANCE”
Le "vert est-il le nouveau noir" en matière de finance ? Comment le secteur financier pourrait-il faire face au changement climatique, aux retraites et à d'autres enjeux économiques clés dans les années à venir ? La digitalisation et l'intelligence artificielle sont-elles vraiment la prochaine frontière de l'investissement ?
L'EDHEC Business School a lancé une nouvelle série de conférences mensuelles en ligne sur "Le futur de la finance". L'objectif est d'aborder les avancées les plus récentes dans l'industrie financière et de discuter de la façon dont la finance peut être un outil puissant pour relever les principaux défis économiques et sociaux. Pour ce faire, cette série réunit tout au long de l'année des experts de renommée internationale et des universitaires reflétant la culture de recherche et l'engagement intellectuel de l'EDHEC Business School #makeanimpact. Le public visé est celui des étudiants en finance de l'EDHEC Business School, des alumni de l'EDHEC, des membres de la communauté élargie de l'EDHEC et des invités.
Season 2 - EDHEC online Speaker Series “The Future of Finance”
Past Speakers
Topic Impact Investing
Date Tuesday May 2nd
Time 6:00.pm-07:00.pm Paris Time
Join us for a talk by Professor Ayako Yasuda, a leading expert in finance and impact investing and Professor of Finance at University of California, Davis. Discover the distinct features of impact investing, how investors in impact VC funds exhibit non-pecuniary preferences, and the scalability of impact investing beyond private markets.
Professor Yasuda will also discuss the limitations of current sustainable mutual funds/ETFs and the need for clarity in labeling. Don't miss this opportunity to gain insights on creating positive social and environmental change through impactful investments.
Speaker
Professor of Finance
University of California, Davis
Graduate School of Management
MODERATORS
Topic Do corporations need a purpose?
Date Tuesday April 18th
Time 6:00.pm-07:00.pm Paris Time
Purpose is the corporate buzzword of today, with politicians, the public, and even shareholders calling on businesses to serve wider society. But purpose is also controversial. Milton Friedman famously wrote that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”, and this statement is far more nuanced than often portrayed – the only way to increase profits, at least in the long-term, is for a company to invest in customers, employees, and communities.
Is it sufficient for a company to focus on long-term profits, or does it need a purpose beyond even long-term profits? We will hear from Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at London Business School and author of “Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit”, recently translated into French.
Speaker
Professor of Finance, non-executive director, author, TED speaker
London Business School (LBS)
Topic Estimating Corporate Carbon Emissions with Machine Learning
Date Tuesday April 4th
Time 6:00.pm-07:00.pm Paris Time
As of 2022, greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions reporting and auditing are not yet compulsory for all companies. We propose a machine learning-based model to estimate scope 1 and scope 2 GHG emissions of companies not yet reporting them.
The model is designed to be transparent, is able to estimate GHG emissions for a large universe of companies and shows good out-of-sample performance. Unlike mainstream approaches, which tend to construct one model for each industry, we construct one single global model that uses industries as a factor.
This addresses the problem of lack of breadth or lack of reported data in some industries and generates practical results even for industries where other approaches have failed.
MODERATORS
Professor of Finance, EDHEC Business School
EDHEC-Risk Climate Impact Institute Research Director
Topic Institutional Trends in Systematic Investing
Date Tuesday March 21st
Time 6:00.pm-07:00.pm Paris Time
Over the recent decade, the space of systematic investing has evolved substantially. In the earlier days of its broader adoption from institutional investors it served the purpose of a liquid, uncorrelated/diversifying stream of returns to overlay on top of strategic asset allocation portfolios. Following some challenging periods, namely 2018 and 2020, the investor focus shifted towards looking for investment solutions that would solve for specific investor objectives/economic outcomes, such as looking for equity-defensive solutions, income-generating solutions, more recently inflation-defensive solutions and so on. In that journey systematic investment strategies have been one scalable and versatile tool in the hands of large institutional investors. Nick will explore current markets trends and potential investment ideas.
SPEAKER
Nick BALTAS
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs
Topic Making sense of green finance - how a smarter financial sector can contribute to the net zero transition
Date Tuesday, 14 February 2023
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
We will hear fom Jean Boissinot, deputy director (financial stability) at Banque de France and Head of the NGFS Secretariat about the development of green finance from a macro and policy perspective. Green and sustainable finance has become a mainstream trend in the financial sector. Yet, its role in the transition remains poorly understood and its value is something being questioned. Jean will draw from a first-hand experience in the development of the global policy agenda and his involvement into various private sector initiatives to propose an understanding of what to expect (and what not to expect) from green and sustainable finance. His talk will draw from this recent book "La Finance verte" published in November 2022 (édition Dunod).
SPEAKER
Jean BOISSINOT
Deputy Director at Banque de France
MODERATORS
Professor of Finance, EDHEC Business School
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School
Topic Navigating the world of ESG ratings
Date Tuesday, 13 December 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
This talk will give an overview of the construction of ESG ratings and show that there is much disagreement between different ESG rating providers. As measurement is one of the most important drivers of the disagreement between raters, Florian will show how measurement errors affect ESG portfolio construction and asset pricing. The talk will end with an analysis of how ratings actually matter economically.
MODERATORS
Professor of Finance, EDHEC Business School
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School
Topic Quantifying Economic Narratives for Financial Markets - A New Approach to Asset Pricing
Date Tuesday, 15 November 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
This talk introduces a systematic approach to quantifying economic narratives based on traditional and social media. Asset-price risk exposures are measured for hundreds of attention-derived narratives, including macroeconomic, ESG, crypto, and emerging trends. Narrative betas can be used to gain or hedge portfolio exposure to narratives by constructing dedicated basket portfolios of narrative-sensitive assets. The framework introduced here extends the traditional paradigm of factor models to a more general class of intangible factors combined with behavioral elements pertaining to investor attention.
MODERATORS
Managing Partner, MKT MediaStats EDHEC Business School, Affiliate Professor State Street, Academic Partner Deloitte, Advisory Board
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School
Topic Passion Assets
Date Tuesday, 18th October 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
We will hear from William Goetzmann, Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies and Faculty Director of the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management, about what research has discovered about art as investment.
Prestige items have been a store of wealth and a symbol of power throughout human history. Now as in the past they are also typically a part of the portfolio of many wealthy investors. William will discuss how the new world of digital, non-fungible art has emerged to challenge traditional contemporary art collecting.
SPEAKER
Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies and Faculty Director of the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management
MODERATORS
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School
Topic The Future of Institutional Investing
Date Tuesday, 13th September 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
We will hear from Marcos Lopez de Prado, Global Head - Quantitative Research and Development at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Professor of Practice at Cornell University, about the reasons why factor investing research remains at a pre-scientific stage, and the need for financial researchers and asset managers to embrace scientific protocols.
SPEAKER
Global Head Quantitative R&D (ABU DHAB Investment Authority) and Professor of Practice (Cornell University)
MODERATORS
Professor, EDHEC-Risk Institute Member
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School
Topic Climate Finance: from Climate Risk to Financial Risk
Date Thursday, 5 May 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
We will hear from Stefano Battiston - Professor of Finance at the University of Zurich, Professor of Economics at University of Venice, and Lead Author of the Chapter on Investment and Finance of sixth IPCC Assessment report - about climate stress test and the analysis of financial risks and opportunities of climate mitigation. The first climate stress-test of European banks will be published later this year. Will they make up for the expectations? The recently published IPCC report says it all: it's now or never. Humanity is at a road junction between starting now a low-carbon transition or facing irreversible and growing impacts of climate change. So what does this means for the financial sector?
Well, of course the low-carbon transition could take place in an orderly way, with no big changes on asset prices. But will it do so? In fact, there is a real possibility of large adjustments in asset valuation if market expectations come to internalise the implications of the decarbonization scenarios. Hence the importance of using adequately the climate scenarios when conduct climate stress-tests.
SPEAKER
Professor of Finance at the University of Zurich, Professor of Economics at University of Venice
MODERATORS
Professor, Researcher at EDHEC-Risk Institute
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School
Topic Quant investing: today and tomorrow
Date Thursday, 28 April 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
We will hear from Weili Zhou, Head of Quant Equity Research at Robeco, about the opportunities and challenges for quant investing in today’s world.
Next to that, from a practitioner’s perspective, she will share her insights on the added value of advanced technologies (e.g. ML and NLP) and alternative datasets (e.g. news flow and social network).
SPEAKER
MODERATORS
Professor of Finance, Edhec Business School.
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School.
Topic DEFI: the Future of Finance?
Date Thursday, 31 March 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
We will hear from Campbell Harvey, Professor of Finance at Duke University on the opportunities and risks of decentralized finance (DeFi). DeFi is a blockchain-based technology that seeks to disrupt traditional channels of savings, lending, exchange and insurance.
In the world of DeFi, all value is tokenized. DeFi is an integral part of both Web3 and the metaverse. While the opportunities are considerable, it is important to understand the risks that this new technology faces.
SPEAKER
MODERATORS
Professor of Finance, Edhec Business School
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School
Topic Will Private Markets Kill Them All?
Date Thursday, 24 March 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
We heard from Ludovic Phalippou, Professor of Financial Economics, Head of Finance Accounting and Management Economics academic area at University of Oxford Said Business School, about the complexity of private markets. Home to a stockpile of mythologies, war-stories and fantasies, private markets are shrouded in complex jargon, hard to penetrate, controversial, and yet partying like it is 1999. They are now everywhere. Taking the investment world by storm. Just passed the $10 trillion mark for Xmas, up from less than $1 trillion just 20 years ago. Went through 2008 and COVID-19 undented. Public markets are so last century – Can they actually die altogether? Or will a hybrid world emerge?
SPEAKER
Professor of Financial Economics, Saïd Business School
Topic SPACs: (almost) everything you need to know about SPACs
Date Thursday, 24 February 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
We will hear from Jay Ritter, Professor of Finance, Warrington College of Business how Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) have boomed in the U.S., with over 600 SPAC IPOs raising more than $160 billion in 2021 alone.
These shell companies then search for a private operating company to merge with, in the process injecting cash and listing it on an exchange. Thus, a SPAC merger is an alternative to a traditional IPO for the opearting company. SPACs have been very controversial, due to poor post-merger returns and the middlemen (the SPAC sponsor and underwriters) taking a big slice of the pie. Jay will discuss the economic rationale for some of the features that are used.
SPEAKER
MODERATORS
Professor of Finance, Edhec Business School
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School
Topic The Odyssey of Sovereign Sustainability
Date Thursday, 17 February 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
We will hear from Eric Bouyé, Manager and Head of Product, Knowledge and Research at World Bank Treasury about the integration of environment and climate risk for sovereign investors, including central banks’ reserve managers.
Most central banks or risk-averse investors still invest primarily in sovereign, supranational or agency bonds for the management of their assets, offering a limited scope to achieve sustainability objectives. Eric will talk about solutions, ongoing initiatives (e.g., NGFS), and how Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) – World Bank, EIB, etc. – have been playing a role in bridging the gap between sustainable and development finance towards the Sustainable Development Goals.
SPEAKER
MODERATORS
Professor of Finance, Edhec Business School
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School
Topic Sustainable Alpha: doing well by doing good?
Date Thursday, 27 January 2022
Time 6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time
We will hear from Andrew Ang, Managing Director and Head of Factor-based strategies at BlackRock how sustainable datasets can be incorporated in style factors and generate alpha.
Sustainable data include non-financial data from social media, influencers, news flow, satellite images, web scraping, and other non-traditional sources. Additionally, Andrew will also discuss net-zero carbon portfolio alignment strategies that have become recently prominent in the investment space.
SPEAKER
Andrew Ang PhD,
Managing Director, Head of BlackRock Systematic Wealth Solutions and Head of the Factor-Based Strategies Group
MODERATORS
Professor of Finance, EDHEC Business School
Professor of Finance, EDHEC Business School
Director of Graduate Finance Programmes, EDHEC Business School