Bachmeier, Lance, and Inkyung Cha: have moved from East Carolina University to Kansas State University, joining Dong Li who did exactly the same three years ago. Inkyung Cha is emplyed as a lecturer there.

Crane, Peggy: I just wanted to pass along the good news that I was the recipient of Southwestern College's Teaching Excellence Award for the 2003-2004 school year and a winner of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) teaching award for that same period.(10/04)

Frentrup, Chris: I have a new job, with a consulting economics firm, MiCRA, Inc., working primarily in antitrust/mergers and telecommunications regulation.

Gilbert, Alton: has retired from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, effective June 1, 2004.

Gritsch, Martin: Things have been going very well for us here in New Jersey. We love our house, have great neighbors, and our two daughters Emma (6) and Sophie (4) were delighted when their brother, Harry, was born in May of this year. I still love my job here at William Paterson University, where wonderful changes have taken place over the past few years in the Cotsakos College of Business. We are one of the few schools nationwide with a trading floor, and a state-of-the-art Professional Sales lab has recently been added. As we just found out this afternoon, the AACSB visiting team will recommend that our College will receive the unconditional accreditation from AACSB International, the premier accrediting body for schools of business. I just started my fifth year here and have recently submitted my materials for consideration by the tenure committee. My departmental committee and the Dean of my College provided strong support with their recommendations, and I hope that by September of next year, I will be a tenured faculty member here at WPU. In summary, I could not be happier. Everything is going extremely well, both personally and professionally. Hope everyone in good ol' Aggieland is doing well too. (Especially now that the football team seems to have figured out how to actually win a ballgame. )

Locke, Peter:I have a paper in forthcoming Journal of Financial Economics publication, I suppose my best publication so far. I also received tenure this year. Not much news otherwise, working hard, much harder than when I was with the government.

Maberly, Edwin D.: Currently a Professor of Finance at University of Canterbury located in Christchurch, New Zealand. As Christchurch is one of the more picturesque cities in the world, I invite all my Aggie friends to come visit while the US dollar still has some value left. Over the last 18 months, the NZ dollar has appreciated over 50% versus the US dollar and the home that I purchased at $130,000 US is now valued, they say, at $290,000 US. For once I bought low, but will I sell high?

On the research front, I have achieve one of my long sought after goals. The top five finance journals are: The Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and lastly The Journal of Business (yes, we consider this a top journal in finance).

In 2003, I had 10 citations in the top 5 finance journals, with at least one in each journal.

Nieswiadomy, Michael: you will be pleased that one of your former students is now famous. Check out this link: Picture, helping his son to move out of the dormitory.

Rupp, Nick: Good news would be that I now have 3 daughters: Jenna (age 2), Madison (4) and Courtney (4). ECU will likely be hiring for a tenure track position this year. ECU has hired 3 TAMU Econ Ph.D's (Dong Li, Lance Bachmeier, Nick Rupp) since 2000. So, I would encourage all Aggies to apply. (10/04)

Schupbach, Matthew : After graduation from TAMU with a Masters in Economics, I began my career as a Financial and Labor Analyst, then became Planning & Analysis Manager, and now the Director of Planning & Analysis at Paragon Casino Resort in Marksville, Louisiana, USA. Those two years were fun. I just wanted to say thanks for the support that you offered me while I was there.

Shughart, Bill: became the co-editor of the journal Public Choice. Bill also sent a news about John Johnson - "JJ resigned from the faculty several years ago to work full-time with a very successful start-up company he co-founded. The company is called FNC, Inc. and has headquarters here in Oxford. (662) 236-2020. My understanding is that the other co-cofounders bought him out recently and that he may have returned to Utah."

Wildenthal, John M.: Things are going very well. The credit model monitoring system I've been working on was called "best in class" by the auditors from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Additional description of his work:

Well, here's a testimony with a description of what I have been doing. I am a technical lead who works with modelers who (primarily) build credit models for scoring loan applicants (think of Fair-Isaac). By law (and for due diligence) the bank must monitor how the models are doing relative to the population on which they were built. There are many different ways the data may need to be compared, within and across models. I'm the one who extracts the data from an IT staging area and preps it for loading into an OLAP system. I'm the one who designed how the data is arranged within the OLAP system so that the interesting information is easy to retrieve. I also work with modelers doing analysis and development tasks. This group has been assigned oversight over all "retail/consumer" risk modeling in the future Bank One/Chase, including loans, credit card offers, collections, profitability, and other behavioral modeling. This group will not be building the scorecards for the credit cards, nor the prime auto loans, but will have oversight responsibilities over those areas.

An OLAP system is a reporting system where one can easily and quickly look at the summarized data filtered and/or broken out along different "dimensions" such as product type, geography, time, sales channel, etc.

In our case, we have time in several ways (when the application was made, when it was booked, how long it has been on the books); geographical dimensions (customer and bank branch); product types; channels; decision type; and model characteristics, attributes, and points (the independent variables, their values, and their contribution to the applicant's score). We are currently using a product called Futrix on top of SAS. I can talk with my boss about giving you a demo over the web. A primitive example of OLAP is Microsoft Excel's Pivot Tables. Do a PROC SUMMARY NWAY on some data, then put it into Excel.

Make the CLASS variables dimensions in the pivot table wizard, and the VAR variables the measures. If you want, I can send you a pivot table and some instructions on how to manipulate it to get a feel for what they're good for. There was a Reason it took me so long to finish. God wanted to prepare me for this.

I was interested in Bounded Rationality modeled via Finite Automata in the early 90s. One of the senior modelers did his dissertation in that area, so we hit it off very well during my interview. Due to my interest in computers, I took 15 hours of graduate MIS courses. Those courses prepped me to work in high end Decision Support. My dissertation required estimation (multivariate optimization) of a nonlinear logistic model. Most of the scorecards are built from logistic models. My experience with multivariate optimization will save Bank One an estimated $300k this year from lower losses on insufficient checks, while decreasing voluntary attrition by increasing the number of checks we clear. Chase is in the process of seeing how the model performs on their accounts. The final annual bottom line difference may be over $750k. Many of the statistical tests in the first part of my dissertation were Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistics. That is the primary statistical test used to report on scorecards.

My first full-time job was at Destia/Viatel. I inherited a data store that grew to 1.2B rows with about 70 columns. The architecture I was given made it extremely difficult to look at data across months. I made some limited patches to get around that in a few areas. I became more acquainted with OLAP reporting architectures. I also developed better SQL skills. In September 2000, I had an extraordinarily persuasive/vivid dream that I was going to work for another company in Houston at a particular salary range beginning some summer. At the time bankruptcy was declared (May 2001), I was working on revising the system to make it more integrated across time.

My second job was at TeleCheck. I began in July at roughly the salary of my dream (I remembered the first digit, not sure about the other digits in the dream). The entryway of the building was a good match for my dream (same black marble floors, same yellow-tan fossil filled walls, security station location and set up the same, elevators in the same basic location). I became the primary architect and the mentor for the primary programmer for (probably by now) a 1B row 600 column data mart.

It is the primary source of data for reporting and analysis for TeleCheck's Risk Control group. The architecture seamlessly integrates more than 5000 individual SAS datasets totalling around 750GB (compressed) behind the scenes such that they look like one data source to the end users. Performance is almost always faster than the IT-operated Data Warehouse running Oracle on a much more powerful Sun box. And the Risk Control data mart is virtually self-maintaining. I further refined my SQL skills and started learnng to be a Database Architect. I gained more skills in OLAP design and reporting.

Now I have a background that crosses statistical modeling and high end reporting with IT experience. I can listen to the modelers and figure out how to explain it to the IT people. I can easily work with both sides. Evidently there aren't many with the right mix of skills. The last question at my interview was an honest "When can you start?"

We may have a position for a modeler, if there are any students still looking. I didn't see any students on the Econweb. The modelers here are about 80% economists, 20% statisticians, and there is a preference for economists. The boss of my boss is Elizabeth Mays. You can google her with the words "Credit Risk" and see her books. Anyone applying obviously needs solid econometric skills. A familiarity with scorecards obviously wouldn't hurt (they could read some of her books). Experience modeling using real world/dirty data is a plus. But we also have behavioral models (e.g. models to use for decisioning on collections), profitability models, and others, so credit modeling is not the be all and end all. If there are people who are happy coding in SAS, we also have openings for three such individuals. This would be analysis and IT type work, not much statistical modeling. But it could lead to that. These wouldn't have to be PhDs, but a M.S. would probably be advisable. Benefits are good, including relocation assistance, 4 weeks vacation, 401K match, etc. The people are really nice to work with. We've found a church much like Grace Bible. We're building a house and will move into it late June. It will have a guest room, if anyone wishes to visit up here.