Yacine Aït-Sahalia

Yacine Aït-Sahalia

Fellow: Awarded 2008
Field of Study: Economics

Competition: US & Canada

Princeton University

Yacine Aït-Sahalia, who received his Ph.D from MIT and previously taught at the University of Chicago, is currently the Otto A. Hack Professor of Finance and Economics at Princeton University.  He is also the inaugural Director of the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton;  under his leadership the Center developed an interdisciplinary undergraduate program, and a master’s degree program in finance.  Since its inception, the Center has awarded over thirty Ph.D. degrees.

Early in his career, Mr. Aït-Sahalia researched the econometrics of continuous time theory and developed new methods to allow nonparametric inference for continuous time-models in finance.  During his term as a Guggenheim Fellow, he will be studying the econometrics of jumps and volatility.  Among his most recent publications is "Closed-Form Likelihood Expansions for Multivariate Diffusions" (Annals of Statistics, 36 [2008], 906-937).

Barclays Global Investors honored him with the Michael J. Brennan Award in 1997, and he has also received the Cornerstone Research Award (1998), the FAME Research Prize (2001), and the Dennis J. Aigner Award (2003).  A highly regarded educator, he has been honored by the University of Chicago with its Emory Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching and Business Week named him to its list of outstanding faculty in financial economics.

Mr. Aït-Sahalia is an elected Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

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