Gary Nance Smith (born 1945) is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College.
Smith earned his B. S. in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College and enrolled in Yale University’s graduate economics program.
The economics department polled students about what courses they would like added to the curriculum and the runaway winners were Marx and the stock market.
[1] Smith wasn’t interested in Marx, but the chair of his thesis committee was Tobin, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, in part for his analysis of financial markets.
So, Smith volunteered to create a stock market course and asked Tobin to recommend a textbook.
His immediate answer was John Burr Williams’ The Theory of Investment Value, which had been published more than 30 years earlier, in 1938, and was not really a textbook.
A widely cited Brookings paper, co-authored with his wife Margaret H. Smith, applied this reasoning to ten U. S. metropolitan areas in 2005 and concluded that there was not a nationwide real estate bubble.
[6] In cities like Indianapolis and Dallas, residential real estate looked like a terrific long-run investment in that the rent savings were much larger than the expenses.
This little-understood phenomenon of regression reaches into nearly every aspect of life, from academic achievements to athletic performance to corporate profits to the campaign trail.
[23] Although not a stock market anomaly, another Smith paper found further evidence of the cognitive biases that lead investors astray: experienced poker players tend to be less cautious after large losses, evidently attempting to recoup their losses quickly.
In his early statistics textbooks, Smith cited a study claiming that famous people can postpone death until after the celebration of their birthdays.
Each illustrated Ronald Coase's dictum, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.” Smith's debunked claims that Asian-Americans are prone to have fatal hearts attacks on the fourth day of the month (the Baskerville effect),[31] Chinese-Americans are more vulnerable to those diseases that Chinese astrology and traditional Chinese medicine associate with their birth years,[32] people whose names have positive initials (such as ACE or VIP) live longer than do people with negative initials (such as PIG or DIE),[33][34] people whose first names begin with the letter D die relatively young,[35] baseball players who are elected to the Hall of Fame have a shortened life expectancy,[36] baseball players born in August are prone to commit suicide,[37] and hurricanes are more deadly if they have female name.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning systems, for example, often rely on data-mining algorithms to construct models with little or no human guidance.
Chaska received his bachelors and masters degrees in math and computer science from Cornell University.