Source: Office of Social Sciences and Humanities
Written by: Office of Social Sciences and Humanities
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

In the afternoon on October 24, 2014, Prof. Robert C. Merton, 1997 Nobel Laureate in Economics and Distinguished Professor of Finance at MIT, gave a lecture entitled “Systemic Risk Measures for the Financial System: A Finance Approach” at Yat-sen Distinguished Scholars Forum in Swasey Hall on South Campus of Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU). Prof. Zheng Detao, Secretary of SYSU Party Committee, Prof. Ma Jun, Assistant President of SYSU, and Prof. Xu Xinzhong, Dean of Lingnan College, met with Prof. Merton before the lecture. More than 280 teachers and students from SYSU and other universities attended the event. The lecture was also live broadcast by SYSU Television Station and Yat-sen Online Lectures on four campuses of SYSU.

In the lecture, Prof. Merton used network theory and econometric techniques to measure connectedness in macrofinancial systems. Through data analysis of 17 sovereigns, 63 banks and 39 insurance companies, he put forward unified macrofinance framework targets. In the Q&A session, Prof. Merton answered questions raised by the teachers and students.

Robert C. Merton is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prof. Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997 for a new method to determine the value of derivatives. He is the author of Continuous-Time Finance and a co-author of Finance and other books. His research focuses on finance theory, including lifecycle and retirement finance, optimal portfolio selection, capital asset pricing, pricing of derivative securities, credit risk, loan guarantees, financial innovation, the dynamics of institutional change, and improving the methods of measuring and managing macro-financial risk.

This lecture is one of a series of lectures in Yat-sen Distinguished Scholars Forum organized for the 90th anniversary of SYSU.