Bates White’s Econometrics Education Program promotes advanced econometrics education for our employees. Hal White, a Founding Partner of the firm, was an econometrics luminary and established a culture of econometrics excellence at Bates White. This program builds on Hal's legacy by formalizing a program to advance internal econometrics education.
The program has three prongs: a Reading Group, a Seminar Series, and a Visiting Scholar Program. Participants are primarily mid-career and junior Economists, but the program is open to everyone at the firm. The program operates on a volunteer basis, with participants encouraged to lead sessions, propose speakers, and attend events.
Reading group
At Reading Group meetings, which are held every six to eight weeks, attendees read and discuss papers, book chapters, etc. that are relevant to our work. Members take turns leading the discussion sessions. Select recent topics include the following:
- Using Synthetic Controls: Feasibility, Data Requirements, and Methodological Aspects
- Double/debiased Machine Learning for Treatment and Structural Parameters
- Stratified Sampling
Seminar series
In this series, external speakers present 90-minute seminars on econometric topics that are relevant to the applied econometrics work we undertake at Bates White. Speakers are available for office visits or small group discussions and have lunch and coffee chats with staff. Speakers and topics have included:
- Svetlana Bryzgalova, Assistant Professor of Finance at the London Business School—Missing Financial Data
- Valentin Verdier, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—Estimating Marginal Emissions on an Electrical Grid: A Naturally Regularized Panel Data Regression
- Raymond Kan, Professor of Finance, Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto—In-Sample and Out-of-Sample Ratios of Multi-Factor Asset Pricing Models
- Torben Anderson, Professor of Finance at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University—Recalcitrant Betas: Intraday Variation in the Cross-Sectional Dispersion of Systematic Risk
Visiting scholar program
The Visiting Scholar Program provides interactions with academic econometricians that allow in-depth examinations of econometrics topics relevant for work at Bates White. They present a series of seminars or workshops and have office hours and group meetings. Our inaugural visiting scholar was Isaiah Andrews from Harvard University; more recently, Professor Jeffrey Wooldridge gave three lectures and offered comments on the contributions to econometrics of Dr. White, with whom he studied.