An MIT Sloan economist runs the numbers on ESG
Financial economist Andrew W. Lo became an ESG believer after developing a mathematical formula that quantifies the financial return on impact investing.
Faculty
Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor, a Professor of Finance, and the Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Lo's current research spans three areas: evolutionary models of investor behavior and adaptive markets, artificial intelligence and financial technology, and healthcare finance. Recent projects include: an evolutionary explanation for bias and discrimination and how to reduce their effects; a new analytical framework for measuring the impact of impact investing; the potential for large language models to provide trustworthy financial advice to retail investors; and new statistical tools for predicting clinical trial outcomes, incorporating patient preferences into the drug approval process, and accelerating biomedical innovation via novel business, financing, and payment models.
Lo has published extensively in academic journals (see http://alo.mit.edu) and his most recent book is Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought. His awards include Batterymarch, Guggenheim, and Sloan Fellowships; the Paul A. Samuelson Award; the Eugene Fama Prize; the IAFE-SunGard Financial Engineer of the Year; the Global Association of Risk Professionals Risk Manager of the Year; the Harry M. Markowitz Award; the Managed Futures Pinnacle Achievement Award; one of TIME’s “100 most influential people in the world”; and awards for teaching excellence from both Wharton and MIT. His book Adaptive Markets has also received a number of awards, listed here. He is a Fellow of Academia Sinica; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Econometric Society; and the Society of Financial Econometrics.
Lo is also a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a member of the New York Federal Reserve Board’s Financial Advisory Roundtable, FINRA’s Economic Advisory Committee, the National Academy of Sciences Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s Board of Overseers, and the boards of Roivant Sciences and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Lo holds a BA in economics from Yale University and an AM and PhD in economics from Harvard University.
Chaudhuri, Shomesh E., and Andrew W. Lo. Journal of Econometrics. Forthcoming.
Alhamdan, Abdullah, Zachery M. Halem, Irene Hernandez, Andrew W. Lo, Manish Singh, and Dennis Whyte. Journal of Investment Management. Forthcoming. Practitioners Digest.
Xu, Qingyang, Elaheh Ahmadi, Alexander Amini, Daniela Rus, and Andrew W. Lo. Drug Safety. Forthcoming.
Hasanhodzic, Jasmina, Andrew W. Lo, and Emanuele Viola. Journal of Portfolio Management. Forthcoming. SSRN Preprint.
Dou, Winston, Xiang Fang, Andrew W. Lo, and Harald Uhlig. Annual Review of Financial Economics. Forthcoming. SSRN Preprint.
Lo, Andrew W., and Ruixun Zhang. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming.
Financial economist Andrew W. Lo became an ESG believer after developing a mathematical formula that quantifies the financial return on impact investing.
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