WSERNRE-2024

Alexander David, PhD, is the David E. Mitchell Professor of Finance at the Haskayne School of Business. He has taught classes in financial risk management, advanced corporate finance, options and futures, investments, energy markets, and asset pricing in the undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA, and PhD programs. His main research focuses on the modeling of changing investors’ uncertainty about the state of economic fundamentals and their impact on asset prices. He has not only constructed structural models of changing uncertainty, but has also estimated these models structurally providing new methodologies for the joint estimation of the parameters of asset prices, volatilities, and fundamentals of the economy. Alex also studies the systemic implications of derivative contracts that are written between banks and, in particular, discusses why banks choose to be highly interconnected, and the role of renegotiation breakdowns between them in triggering off a chain of financial disruptions. He also has studied the role of changing rating standards by Credit Rating Agencies in the pricing of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). Alex has also several projects on energy and commodities futures pricing. He has shown that the main driver of the oil futures slope and the risk premium is upstream investment by oil companies rather than inventories. He has provided an explanation for the divergence in producer and consumer prices for food and essential goods during the pandemic.