Life in MIT: MIT150 Econ & Finance Symposium: From Theory to Practice to Policy

Left to right: Myers, Scholes, Merton, Cox and Ross

On Thursday, Jan. 27, and Friday, Jan. 28, I attended the MIT 150 Economics and Finance symposium, one of a number of events to be held to celebrate MIT’s 150 anniversary.

The panels on the first day mainly focused on economics, specifically, on recent advance in the modeling of household and firm behavior, macroeconomics and growth, current policy challenges facing the global economic systems and regulatory policy design. The second day focused on Finance with two morning panels: the first on the development and evolution of financial technology; the second on finance in practice and current challenges. Among all the panelists, seven are Nobel prize winners.

My name tag

I was particularly excited about the first morning session on the second day, which included Scholes, Merton, Cox, Myers and Ross -- the five founding fathers of finance. Andrew Lo was the moderator. He mentioned that when he was in high school, he usually dropped and picked up his sister at MIT with his parents. He was pretty impressed by the fact that all the buildings at MIT are indentified only by numbers. His sister told him that there is actually a logic to the numbering. The numerical value of the building is inversely proportional to the significance of the department in that building. Building one is the president’s office, Building two is the mathematic’ s, the foundation of all the sciences. Years later, once he got the offer from MIT Sloan, he asked the dean “ excuse me, but what is the number of Sloan building?” as we all know it was 51, and it’s now getting worse, E62.:D I actually heard this opening speech on the first day of our program, but still laughed when he said this second time. Now, Andrew Lo is teaching us Analytics of Finance II, which I considered was one the coolest course at Sloan. He is very articulate so the course won’t be as boring as its name at all.