Mahatma Gandhi award for econometrics pioneer

Deakin’s Professor of Finance and Co-director of the Centre for Economics and Financial Econometrics Research (CEFER), Paresh Narayan, has received a 2015 Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Samman award.

The award acknowledges people of Indian origin, living in other countries, who have made a substantial contribution to their discipline over a period of time and have contributed to international philanthropic endeavours and community projects. It is presented by the government of India and the Non-Resident Indians (NRI) Welfare Society of India to around 30 candidates each year.

Professor Narayan has had an extraordinary career since joining Deakin in 2007. He became Deakin’s first Professor of Finance in 2007 and, in 2012, became the first Alfred Deakin Professor in Deakin’s Faculty of Business and Law – and the youngest ever recipient of this honour, at the age of 35.

Deakin’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Lee Astheimer congratulated Professor Narayan on his latest achievement.

“This award is a significant milestone for Professor Narayan,” she said.

“We are very proud of his success, both through his personal research efforts and his strategic positioning of Deakin as an international leader in the field of financial econometrics.”

With strong roots in statistics, financial econometrics combines the disciplines of finance and econometrics to provide more accurate forecasting and risk management/analysis models, particularly through a sophisticated set of tools and methods.

Over the past seven years, Professor Narayan has devoted his prodigious energies to building Deakin’s expertise in this area. He began by leading the restructure of Deakin’s Schools of Accounting, Economics and Finance - including a major injection of human resources - to incorporate a strong research emphasis, without sacrificing the quality of teaching.

This was followed by the establishment of Australia’s first Financial Econometrics research group in 2011, which became the Strategic Research Centre (CEFER) in 2014.

“The Finance Department at Deakin is now known for the work that CEFER has done on asset pricing and commodity markets research, based on recent methodological developments in financial econometrics,” said Professor Narayan.

“These new tools have been used to advance understanding of several hypotheses in financial economics, from market efficiency to price discovery.”

The Centre has hosted several conferences of premier Finance journals, such as the Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Futures Markets and Journal of Financial Markets. Researchers from about 40 different countries have presented their work at these conferences, and a number of world-leading researchers and several Editors of leading finance journals have visited CEFER in recent years.

Supported by CEFER staff, Professor Narayan is also Editor-in-Chief of the A-ranked Econometrics Journal, “Economic Modelling” and Subject Editor of the A-ranked “Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money.”

He has also been keynote speaker at a number of high profile forums, such as the 2015 Shanghai Forum and the 2015 G20 meetings in Istanbul, Turkey, where he spoke on Islamic Finance.

His papers have received over 8,500 Google citations during the past seven years. “Research Papers in Economics” ranks him amongst the top five per cent of authors in the world in economics and finance.

A citation from the 2014 Scopus “Young Researcher of the Year” runner up award described him as “a prodigious publisher who makes a significant contribution to his field of econometrics, largely through projects funded by international development agencies.” For instance, Professor Narayan was contracted by the Asian Development Bank to conduct financial econometric workshops for policy makers at the Central Bank of Solomon Islands.

There can be no doubt that Deakin and the international financial community will hear more from Paresh Narayan, who says that his efforts, so far, have centred on the establishment phase of bringing finance and econometrics together.

“Our best work has yet to be published. Over the next three to five years, we will see the fruits of our current research flowing out to the wider industry, particularly to banks and other financial institutions,” he said.