Kevin Dowd

Kevin Dowd
Born 1958
Middlesbrough, England
Nationality Dual Irish/British
Institution Durham University Cobden Partners
School or
tradition		 Free Banking, Austrian economics
Alma mater University of Sheffield (PhD) 1988
University of Western Ontario (MA) 1981
University of Sheffield (BA) 1980
Influences Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Chris R. Tame
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Kevin Dowd is an economist with research interests in private money and free banking, monetary and macro economics, financial risk measurement and management, risk disclosure, political economy and policy analysis, pensions and mortality modelling. He is currently Professor of Finance and Economics at Durham University Business School and a partner in Cobden Partners based in London.

Life and career

Dowd was born in Middlesbrough in 1958, attended St Mary's College, Middlesbrough and went to the University of Sheffield in 1977 to study economics. He holds a BA (first class honours) in economics from the University of Sheffield, an MA in economics from the University of Western Ontario, and a PhD in macroeconomics from the University of Sheffield. He has held previous positions with the Ontario Economic Council in Toronto, Sheffield Hallam University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Nottingham.

He is affiliated with the Cato Institute, The Cobden Centre for Honest Money and Social Progress, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Istituto Bruno Leoni, the Independent Institute and the Pensions Institute.

Views, Writings and Work

Dowd's main subject of research is private money and free banking – monetary and financial systems that operate without any government intervention and in the absence of any central bank. A related focus of his work is on central banking and other forms of state intervention into the economy, most particularly, on deposit insurance, the lender of last resort and bank capital adequacy regulation. He has repeatedly called for the abolition of central banks and an end to state intervention in the financial system.

He advocates competitive monetary systems: his latest book, New Private Monies – a Bit-Part Player?, is supportive of private gold money systems such as the Liberty Dollar and e-gold, and expresses measured support for Bitcoin. Dowd is a supporter of commodity-based monetary systems such as the gold standard and is a critic of fiat-based money issued by a central bank.

He takes a largely Austrian approach to economics, but one that is heavily influenced by the Quantity Theory of Money and the work of monetarists such as Milton Friedman and David Laidler. He supports laissez-faire and is critical of Keynesian and other interventionist schools of economics.

He has proposed a free-market approach to the resolution of the ongoing financial crisis based on extended personal liability for senior bankers, the exit of the state from the financial system and the restoration of a sound monetary standard. To this end, he has also advised Steve Baker, the Conservative MP for Wycombe, on his two Private Member's Bills to resolve the crisis: the Financial Services (Regulation of Derivatives) Bill, which sought to restore sound accounting standards, and the Financial Institutions (Reform) Bill, which called for radical reforms to the banking system and an end to state involvement in banking.

He has repeatedly argued that the Global Financial Crisis has never been resolved and that the policies adopted since 2007 have been ineffective, illegal and very counter-productive: a renewed outbreak of the crisis is therefore highly likely, with the prospects of financial collapse, high inflation and government insolvency around much of the developed world.

Dowd has also written extensively on financial risk measurement and management. He has argued that most financial modelling is conceptually invalid because it is based on a naïve ‘scientistic’ belief that economic systems can be modelled using quantitative methods inappropriately imported from natural sciences such as physics. He is particularly critical of the widely used Value-at-Risk or VaR risk measure,[1] the use of the Gaussian distribution in risk management[2] and the use of financial risk models for regulatory purposes.[3]

Dowd is the co-inventor of the PensionMetrics Defined-Contribution (DC) stochastic pension model[4] and the Stochastic Lifestyling asset allocation strategy.[5] He and David Blake have proposed a set of good principles in the modelling of DC pension plans and Debbie Harrison, Blake and Dowd have recently published two reports into the state of the DC pensions market in the UK: Caveat Venditor, which advocated that pensions should be governed by the principle of seller not buyer beware, and VfM, which examined value for money in the UK pensions market. These reports were critical of the high charges, over-complexity and lack of transparency in the UK pensions industry.

In the life actuarial field, he and his collaborators have written a considerable amount on the financial implications of mortality and longevity risk; they also invented survivor swaps, survivor swaptions, the CBD mortality model[6] and the gravity two-population mortality model.[7]

Dowd also works with Cobden Partners, a sovereign advisory service based in London, and is a founder member of the Sofia Business School based in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Books

References

  1. ↑ See, e.g., K. Dowd and D. Blake "After VaR: The Theory, Estimation, and Insurance Applications of Quantile-based Risk Measures." Journal of Risk and Insurance. Volume 73, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 193–228.
  2. ↑ See K. Dowd, J. Cotter, C. G. Humphrey and M. Woods "How Unlucky is 25-Sigma?" Journal of Portfolio Management, Volume 34 (Number 4), 2008, pp.76–80.
  3. ↑ See K. Dowd, M. Hutchinson, S. Ashby and J. Hinchliffe, "Capital Inadequacies: The Dismal Failure of the Basel System of Bank Capital Regulation." Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 681, 29 July 2011, and K. Dowd Math Gone Mad: Regulatory Risk Modeling by the Federal Reserve." Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 754, 3 September 2014.
  4. ↑ See D. Blake, A. J. G. Cairns and K. Dowd, "Pensionmetrics: Stochastic Pension Plan Design and Value-at-Risk during the Accumulation Phase." Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Vol. 29, No. 2, October 2001, pp. 187–215.
  5. ↑ See A. J. G. Cairns, D. Blake and K. Dowd, “Stochastic Lifestyling: Optimal Dynamic Asset Allocation for Defined-Contribution Pension Plans." Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Vol. 30, 2006, pp. 843–877).
  6. ↑ See A. J. G. Cairns, D. Blake and K. Dowd, "A Two-Factor Model for Stochastic Mortality with Parameter Uncertainty: Theory and Calibration." Journal of Risk and Insurance. Volume 73, No. 4, December 2006, pp. 687–718).
  7. ↑ See K. Dowd, A. J. G. Cairns, D. Blake, G. D. Coughlan, D. Epstein, and M. Khalaf-Allah, "A Gravity Model of Mortality Rates for Two Related Populations" North American Actuarial Journal, 2011, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 334–356

External links

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