Prof. Olivier Scaillet
SFI Senior Chair, Professor of Finance and Statistics, University of Geneva
Olivier Scaillet is Professor of Finance and Statistics at the University of Geneva and Head of the Geneva Finance Research Institute at the University. Professor Scaillet is a regular speaker at leading finance and financial econometrics conferences. His papers have been published in the top academic journals in these fields and he is an elected fellow of several leading academic societies in econometrics and statistics.
Expertise
Professor Scaillet studies the gains institutional investors could achieve by reallocating their portfolios away from bonds and stocks and toward more illiquid assets. Data covering nearly 20 years of asset prices reveals that, at the global market level, the reallocation of one-fifth of a bond and stock portfolio to privately traded illiquid assets improves portfolio returns significantly. And that a strategy aiming to minimize volatility offers the highest returns. The main driver of these findings is that illiquid assets, such as real estate and private equity, typically offer better returns than bonds and stocks and are negatively correlated with bonds. Professor Scaillet actively participates in SFI Knowledge Exchange activities on cyber vulnerabilities and portfolio diversification.
Expertise Fields
- Financial Markets
- Financial Forecasting
- International Financial Markets and Emerging Markets
- Systemic Risk and Regulation
- Portfolio Management and Asset Classes
- Asset Pricing
- Behavioral Finance and Neurofinance
- Equities
- Options and Other Derivatives
- Portfolio Management
- Financial Institutions
- Independent Asset Managers
- Institutional Investors and Funds
- Pension Funds
- Corporate Finance and Governance
- Financial Risk and Risk Management
- Frontier Topics
- Big Data and Fintech
- Operations Research and Decision Theory