About me
Sergio Focardi, PhD
I'm currently Professor at the University of Genoa DIME where I teach Financial Engineering and Risk Management. I am also the founder of the consulting firm Economics and Complexity. I have taught Complexity Economics at Franklin University, Lugano, Switzerland. Previously, I was a Professor of Finance at the Pole Universitaire Léonard De Vinci, Paris La Defense, France and a researcher at the De Vinci Research Center after spending three years as Visiting Professor of Finance at the University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island, and lecturing at Princeton University. I hold a degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Genova (Italy) and a PhD in Mathematical Finance from the University of Karlsruhe (Germany). In Genova I was a cofounder of the Interdisciplinary Research Center in Economics & Finance at the University of Genova.
My Research Interests
Currently the focus of my research are Causation and Causal Models and their application to Economics, Finance, and Business Innovation. My interest in Causal Models was initially due to my research on sustainability. Making firms truly sustainable requires understanding the causality of change and innovation. The current generation of causal models, in particular Structural Causal Models - SCM - is very useful for understanding the causal links between the variables that describe a firm. However the causal modelling effort requires a careful optimization of the descriptive framework of a firm. Innovation and moving towards true sustainability require a process of continuous adaptation of models and descriptive frameworks akin to the paradigm shifts of physics. The focus of my research is the process of evolution of causal models.
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The underlying theme of my research activity is the study and modelling of economies and markets as complex systems formed by interacting agents with a money generation process. As a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Research Center in Economics & Finance (CINEF) in 2000 at the University of Genoa, I contributed to the creation of multi-agent artificial markets. Our objective was to study the price formation process of artificial markets, showing that the evolution of the distribution of wealth follows inverse power laws. I later applied the techniques of percolation and random graphs to problems of risk management, proposing to use market connectivity parameters as a risk factor. I also applied models of autoregressive conditional duration to the problem of credit risk.
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​More recently, my interests focus on more economic subjects. In particular, I am studying the theory of qualitative economic growth. I developed models of qualitative growth, where the key insight is that macroeconomic models are only abstract relationships that link observable monetary variables in monetary economics.
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