Biography
Dennis McLeavey, CFA, was head of regulator and program recognition, as well as a content director for quantitative methods at CFA Institute. He is professor emeritus of finance and management science at the University of Rhode Island. McLeavey has also served as head of education, EMEA, at CFA Institute and as head of curriculum development for the CFA Program. He is coauthor of Quantitative Investment Analysis, a Wiley text in the CFA Institute Investment Series. He also coauthored Global Investments, Production Planning and Inventory Control, and Operations Research for Management Decisions, and is coeditor of Managing Investor Portfolios. His research has been published in Management Science, the Journal of Operations Research, and the Journal of Portfolio Management, among others. McLeavey has taught at the University of Western Ontario and the University of Rhode Island. He has served as chairperson of the CFA Institute Retirement Investment Policy Committee and as a New York Stock Exchange arbitrator. In 2008, he initiated the CFA Institute Take 15 webcast series. He serves on the Fund Advisory Board for the Global Perspectives Fund at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flegler Business School, and he oversees the Ram Fund at the University of Rhode Island. McLeavey holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Western Ontario and a doctorate in production management and industrial engineering, with a minor in mathematics, from Indiana University.
Lies, damned lies, and earnings management. If 20% of firms misrepresent economic reality through earnings management, analysts and portfolio managers must protect themselves by knowing how, why, and when individuals lie. Quantitative methods with forensic formulas, such as the Beneish model, offer part of the necessary skills to distinguish earnings manipulation from earnings management.
In economic and financial matters, paternalism — protecting an individual from himself or herself — comes in many guises with one common theme: the maximization of welfare. Yet it raises a question with no easy answers: When exactly should individuals or investors be protected from making their own bad choices?
What do quant great Edward O. Thorp, behavioralist Jamies Montier, and value investing legends, Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett, have in common? These investment practitioners all make a seemingly incongruous appearance together in Quantitative Value, a new book by Wesley Gray and Tobias Carlisle.
With all of the variables in play, practitioners can be easily led astray when interpreting the results of time-series studies. A recent controversial paper on the relative economic value of tax cuts, provides an excellent example of why analysts must be alert to the challenges of multiple regression with time-series variables.