University of Edinburgh

Graduate Student, Sociology

School of Social and Political Science

Thesis Title: The social and organisational shaping of financial valuation practices: a study of the interest rate derivatives market

About

My current research lies at the intersection of sociology and finance and draws upon economic sociology, science & technology studies, and socio-legal studies. I'm generally interested in developing an empirical account of how market participants come to agreement over the value of abstract financial products, especially for those products that are highly customised and aren't traded on public exchanges.

For my PhD thesis, I am studying the community of "quants'' and financial engineers who value interest-rate derivative contracts, the largest group of over-the-counter products in existence. This community comprises a motley group of physicists, mathematicians, traders, and attorneys working in both academia and financial institutions who are responsible for developing models and evaluation practices for valuing a wide range of financial contracts whose value depends on changes in market interest rates. I'm principally interested in the social dynamics underlying the development, selection, and use of valuation practices in this field. For instance, I'm interested in:

- Explaining and understanding the emergence of the interest rates market as distinct from the bond market during the 1980s, and the role of valuation practices in stabilising the cognitive separation between these fields.

- Understanding the relationship between advances in interest-rate derivatives valuation and developments in the "technical legal infrastructure" that underlies OTC derivative contracts (e.g. the ISDA collateral regime).

- How communities of practitioners protect themselves against the more pathological properties of financial models; for instance, the fact that a model's predictions can be subject to self-falsification, especially when it is novel and is undergoing rapid adoption.

- How the present financial crisis is reshaping current market valuation practices.

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