ScienceGuy

Academicians from the University of Geneva and professionals from UBS aids us to gain an understanding of the theory underlying optimal portfolio construction, the different ways portfolios are actually built in practice and how to measure and manage the risk of portfolios.

A derivative instrument is a contract which specifies the conditions under which a transaction will take place in the future. The price of the derivative depends on the price of another asset called as the underlying asset.

These financial instruments are not just interesting for traders and to deepen pockets but even from economics and research point of view, these instruments are fascinating.

 As we know, the share price of a firm, at least theoretically, are the discounted values of expected future cash flows. This method to value stock price, as discussed in the article, understanding financial markets, is called the discounted cash flow method.

Academicians from the University of Geneva and professionals from UBS dive into the concepts of rationality and irrationality and understand how they impact our investment decisions and what the consequences can be at the market level.

Academicians from the University of Geneva and professionals from UBS tells what the main financial markets and their characteristics are and how they are linked to the economy. We start by seeing how the price of stocks and bonds are computed and why they move.

Behavioural finance is the study of the effects of psychological effects on decision making on financial investors, thereby effecting market outcomes. So, basically, it studies the psychology of financial decision making

Two theories are prevalent regarding the relationship between corruption and economic growth

 Click here to access the file containing my learnings of GFC based on Yale's course.

Recently, while reading about the history of religions, I read that several founders of world religions, like, Christ, Zoroaster, Confucius, Buddha were born and lived in 1st millennium BC.

Our Milky Way is a spiralling Galaxy containing 100-400 billion stars, with a stellar disk diameter of approximately 150,000-200,000 light-years and depth of 2000 light-years.

Evolution of the Universe

Soon after the big bang, followed by inflationary epoch, the universe was in a hot plasmonic state containing a mixture of radiation and baryons. The universe being in this fluid state made it possible for the pressure waves to travel. So, the universe had baryons and environment to support acoustic oscillations.

Occasional paintings - done by water colours

What is Dark matter and Why need it?

In the paper, the author's then went ahead to examine the extent to which various regimes constraint policy space for member nations. They studied four US agreements 

Revolution is a drastic change of some sort within a short span of time. In Latin, it means ‘ a turn-around’.

Development is a long-run process of transforming the economy from concentrated primary product-based economy to diversified set of assets based on knowledge.

Click here to read my notes

Click here to read my notes

Click here to read my notes

  Click here to read my notes

Read concise points from each chapter of the history of economics - click here

In the circle of family and friends, there has been a lot of discussion about India's poor COVID management. Although I do not disagree with them, the situation could have been managed in a better fashion given the late onset of COVID relative to the rest of the world.

The novel corona-virus continues to puzzle researchers around the world, thereby raising risks to magnanimous scales. However, the good news is that the human efforts are matching its levels as well. One such research was performed by Dr. Daniel Jacobson’s group who utilized worlds second fastest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennesse and studied around 2.5 billion genetic combinations.

Dollar currency paradigm means that dollar matters a lot in global trade. So suppose, India and Brazil are involved in a bilateral trade whereby India buys oil from Brazil while Brazil buys pharmaceutical drugs from India.

Generally, some of the developed countries (mainly the US) claim that it is the developing world responsible for the current state of emissions and they should be the one held responsible and not the developed countries.

Interestingly in my MSc. essay, I had observed that the direct impact of oil prices are negative on CPI but positive on WPI.

I have been asked several times if my chemical engineering study was useful at all in economies. As I always used to answer, the concepts are omnipresent.

- Summarised from Asian Development Bank's authors A. Abiad, M. Arao, E. Lavina, R. Platitas, J. Pagaduan, C. Jabagat's chapter in  COVID in developing economies

- Summarised from World Bank's authors Rabah Arezki, Rachel Yuting Fan and Ha Nguyen's chapter in  COVID in developing economies

- Summarised from World Bank's authors Calvin Z. Djiofack, Hasan Dudu and Albert G. Zeufack's chapter in COVID in developing economies

- Summarised from Ilan Noy,  Nguyen Doan, Benno Ferrarini and Donghyun Park's article in COVID-19 in developing countries

Petrol prices were market-linked in 2010 and diesel later in 2014 for retail consumers. Although I do encourage and support this move as they would improve fiscal balance, make energy usage more sufficient and would be better for the environment as well.

- Summarised from Constantino Hevia and Andy Neumeyer's chapter from   COVID-19 in Developing Economies The authors plotted Google mobility trends for places of work and for retail and recreation like restaurants, cafes etc which showed declines,

The macroeconomic flu is a temporary negative supply and demand shock, that is a temporary decline in output followed by a quick recovery.

WITS data shows that the export share to China from India in 2018 stood at 5%. Imports, on the other hand, stood at 14.7% making China the largest import partner of India and that too by a big margin as the US occupying the second spot has an import share of 6.3%.

Click here to read the compilation by the IMF containing summarized timeline and policy responses - Fiscal, Monetary etc

FDI would play an important role in the post-COVID revival of the developing world. World Bank's Global Investment Competitiveness Report 2019-20 discusses the FDI scenario before COVID and during the COVID times.

Amongst top CO2 emitters (1960-2010) by absolute emissions stand these economies:

With international borders closed and Vande Bharat flights being the only respite, I am writing my experience of Vande Bharat flight flew on from London Heathrow to Delhi which I flew in mid-June 2020.

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Click here to access notes.

My review of the paper by Angus Deaton 

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Suppose there's a closed economy. Now imagine a household (economy) with two people A and B in which B always borrows money from A.

Parker Probe

Journalist - Chemical Department's Magazine  - Volume-1 , Volume-2 

Some broad simulation examples about topics that I have worked on...

Outline Shear-thinning, Shear thickening and Bingham fluids

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Security prodigies of Ben Gurion University are working to develop a technique with which they would be able to harvest data even from an air-gapped system. Air-gapped system (scratching head), What's that?   let's have a look.

(I) Still existing as one of the biggest mysteries is that of quantum entanglement . Even the greatest minds of the century, like Albert Einstein also had to struggle to understand such a phenomenon and was compelled to say it as “spooky phenomenon at some distance”.

At the alarming rate with which our non-renewable resources are depleting, leaving behind the poisonous smoke, the need of the hour is to find sustainable sources of energy.

Philosophical article on perceptions and illusions. Click here to read

My python codes: 1. Cipher's:

Southeast Asian experience of the 1970s and 1980s consisted of high growth based on export  competitiveness, low debt combined with low and stable inflation. Most of the East Asian  countries were running budget surpluses.

The work examines whether it is possible to accurately forecast dividend yield using aggregate stock returns in S&P500,

Problem Statement: A local council is planning to build a rubbish incinerator on a piece of the English countryside that is much loved and used by local residents.

There's no clear demarcation between ML, AI, statistics and econometrics. But there are some techniques under ML/AI that are not present in econometrics and could be quite beneficial to adopt.

Click here to access notes. The notes are based on lectures by Dr. Rachael Meager , LSE  and based on studies from listed references:

Click here to access notes. The notes are based on lectures by Dr. Rachael Meager, LSE and based on studies from listed references:

Click here to access notes. The notes are based on lectures by Dr. Rachael Meager , LSE  and based on studies from listed references:

Click here to access notes. The notes are based on lectures by Dr. Rachael Meager , LSE  and based on studies from listed references:

Click here to access notes. The notes are based on lectures by Dr. Rachael Meager , LSE  and based on studies from listed references: 1. Stock and Watson, Introduction to Econometrics 2. Wooldridge, Econometric Analysis of Cross-section and Panel Data 3. Raghvir Sabharwal LSE page - link here

This post is especially for the new-comers to the game theory. When I had started studying these topics, I remember being struggling to properly understand the differences and get an intuition of what's happening and I had seen my friends struggle as well.

In this post, I review an interesting interview about the decision-making process by an ex-spy and the National Security Advisor of India and connect it with a simplistic optimization procedure used in fundamentally and frequently in  economics .

I performed simulations in HPC-computing facility of IITD, the 4th fastest supercomputer in India.  With emission norms getting more and more stringent, it has become important to improve the performance of trickle bed reactors to produce better fuel quality with sulphur content less than 10 ppm (e.g. ultra-low sulphur diesel).

Aadhaar, India's ambitious biometric ID project, was portrayed as one that would enhance India's welfare efforts by promoting inclusion and reducing corruption. From being a voluntary ID, it has become de facto compulsory for most welfare programmes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and the Public Distribution System (PDS).

The big picture in this model is that markets do not clear instantaneously to make everyone happy. There are frictions in the labour market. This Diamond, Pissarides model has real unemployment. In RBC models we witness that unemployment is voluntary in nature.

Outline: Monopoly Review Price Discrimination

Berkeley Earth

There is a lot of concern in some quarters about central banks printing money to finance large budget deficits. And in other quarters there is concern that central banks are doing too little of it. Some worry that central banks are lending directly to the government. Others are assuaged when central banks buy government debt in the secondary market but not directly. Who is right? My summary of the article by Dr. Rajan (find the link of the original article at the end) where I have used balance sheets to visualize the flow. Meanwhile, I also found a few points which I found weren't mentioned in the article. Feel free to comment on what you think about it. Click here  to read the original article. 

The study explores the effect of trade and FDI contributed to CO2 emissions in China from 1981-2014. It finds that trade, mainly exports, and FDI had significantly led to higher emissions. Thereby it finds evidence in support of Pollution Haven Hypothesis.

India is a net importer of energy, with High-Speed-Diesel playing a central role in India’s energy dynamics. Due to this, diesel prices were passed in a controlled manner and distributed asymmetrically between favourable and unfavourable shocks.