I’m a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh.

My current research lies at the intersection of sociology and finance. I’m generally interested in the social dynamics of financial innovation, and how market participants come to agreements about the value of abstract financial products, especially those that are highly customised and aren’t traded on public exchanges. Economic theory has established how markets can effectively aggregate information about the value of standardised products such as stocks, bonds and futures, but much less is known about the social processes underling the valuation of financial contracts for which there is no definitive market price, such as derivative contracts that are traded “over the counter”.

For my PhD thesis, I am studying the community of “quants” and financial engineers who value interest-rate derivative contracts, the largest group of over-the-counter products in existence. This community comprises a motley group of physicists, mathematicians, traders, and attorneys working in both academia and financial institutions who are responsible for developing models and evaluation practices for valuing a wide range of financial contracts whose value depends on changes in market interest rates.

I’m principally interested in the social dynamics underlying the development, selection, and use of valuation practices in this field. For instance, I’m interested in:

• Why different kinds of products (e.g. vanilla swaps vs. exotic swaps) and different types of institutions (e.g. buy-side vs. sell-side firms) require the use of distinctive kinds of interest-rate models.
• Understanding the relationship between advances in interest-rate modelling and developments in the “technical legal infrastructure” that underlies OTC derivative contracts (e.g. the ISDA collateral regime). This issue is particularly topical as the use of collateral has become more important since the financial crisis of 2008.
• How communities of practitioners protect themselves against the more pathological properties of financial models; for instance, the fact that a model’s predictions can be subject to self-falsification, especially when it is novel and is undergoing rapid adoption.
• How the present financial crisis is reshaping current market valuation practices

Along with the sociology of finance, I’m principally interested in the social studies of science and technology and issues in science, technology, and innovation policy.