David K. A. Mordecai

David K.A. Mordecai is President and co-founder of Risk Economics, Inc., a New York City based advisory firm. Risk Economics® specializes in the application of computational economics to the proprietary development and scalable implementation of robust modeling and data analytic frameworks for valuation, strategic and systemic risk analysis, and dynamic asset-liability management.

Dr. Mordecai is the principal scientist and lead investigator at the RiskEcon® Lab for Decision Metrics and Visiting Scholar at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU). He has a joint appointment as Senior Research Scholar for Computational Economics of Commerce, Law and Geo-Politics at NYU Stern Graduate School of Business.  He is also an adjunct professor of applied mathematics at Courant, and a Fellow and member of the Advisory Board of the Mathematical Finance Program at Courant, having served as a guest lecturer for the program since 2006. In addition, as an active member of the working group for NYU Center for Data Science (NYUCDS), he is in the process of being appointed Scientist-in-Residence, Senior Advisor and Executive-in-Residence for Insurance, Capital Markets, and Financial Service Technologies at NYUCDS. As Senior Advisor and Executive-in-Residence, he will serve as a founding member of the NYUCDS industry advisory board.

As Senior Advisor, as well as Member of the Advisory Committee, for Compass Lexecon, David serves as an expert on loss causation and economic damages related to market structure, financial institutions governance, and complex issues related to finance, economics and market standards and practices within securities, derivatives, reinsurance, and commodities markets, as well as market structure within a broad range of non-financial industry sectors. His expertise includes financial engineering, the valuation of fixed income securities and structured products, including over-the-counter derivatives (in particular fixed income and credit derivatives), complex insurance and reinsurance liabilities, as well as asset liability and risk management models and practices. Compass Lexecon is a unit of FTI Consulting, a NYSE traded corporation.

During his thirty year tenure in the financial services industry, David has served as a Managing Director at Swiss Re, where he led Relative-Value Market Strategies, a quantitative economics and financial engineering function with the global mandate to develop firm-wide and industry standards, benchmarks and frameworks for the valuation and trading of exposures underlying long-dated life, health, medical and pension liabilities as well as geopolitical risk. Prior to this, he served as Senior Advisor to the Head of Swiss Re Financial Services. Previously, at a multi-strategy hedge fund with $10 Billion of assets under management, he was Managing Director of Structured Products, responsible for $5 billion of CDO assets. Prior to his role as a hedge fund manager, he was Vice President of Financial Engineering/Principal Finance at AIG, and a Director at the rating agency Fitch. During the first decade of his career, he specialized in credit analysis and the origination, structuring, and trading of leveraged loans for non-recourse project finance and highly leveraged transactions involving corporations and financial institutions.

David has served as an advisor on systemic risk issues to the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and as an advisor on hedge fund valuation issues to the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO). He has also been a member of the Investment Advisory Committee of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). He is the founding Co-Chair of the International Association of Financial Engineers’ (IAFE) Liquidity Risk Committee, and has actively served on the Steering Committee of the IAFE’s Investor Risk Working Group on hedge fund and CTA disclosure issues, as well as the Advisory Board.

David was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Risk Finance (JRF), a quarterly peer-reviewed research periodical, which addresses topics in financial risk intermediation. He remains a senior member of JRF’s Advisory Board subsequent to its sale by the original publishers Institutional Investor/Euromoney to Emerald Publications. He has published numerous articles on topics including hedge fund strategies, structured credit, and weather and insurance derivatives.  He has also been a guest lecturer at Columbia University, at the Graduate Business School, the Engineering/Operations Research Division, as well as the School for Public Policy.

He holds a Ph.D. with concentrations in Econometrics/Statistics and Economics/Industrial Organization from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and an M.B.A. in Finance from the NYU Stern School of Business. His doctoral research focused on the limits of arbitrage, and how market shocks trigger contagion via the financing of highly leveraged financial institutions during periods of extreme market volatility.

His biography has been published in the Marquis publications Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, and Who’s Who in Finance and Business.