Neil Shephard


Neil Shephard, FBA, is an econometrician, currently Frank B. Baird Jr., Professor of Science in the Department of Economics and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. He is Head of the Department of Statistics at Harvard.
His most well known contributions are: the formalisation of the econometrics of realised volatility, which nonparametrically estimates the volatility of asset prices, the introduction of the auxiliary particle filter, the nonparametric identification of jumps in financial economics, through multipower variation, stochastic volatility models based on non-Gaussian Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, known as 'Barndorff-Nielsen-Shephard' models.

Early life and education

Neil Shephard was born in Plymouth, England, but moved to Norfolk, England, at age of one. He attended the Marshland High School, King Edward VII Grammar School in King's Lynn and City of Norwich School. He studied economics and statistics as an undergraduate at the University of York in the UK 1983-1986. He did his M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the LSE.

Academic career

He was a lecturer in statistics at the LSE from 1988 to 1993. He moved to Nuffield College, Oxford in 1991 to join the economics group. He was Professor of Economics and of Statistics from 2013 to 2018 at Harvard University.
He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2006, a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2004. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in economics by Aarhus University in 2009, the 2012 Richard Stone Prize in Applied Econometrics and the 2017 Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society.
With David F. Hendry he founded the Econometrics Journal in 1998. With Colin Mayer he founded Oxford University's Masters in Financial Economics. In 2007 he founded the Oxford-Man Institute, which he directed from 2007 to 2011. He chaired the Statistics Department at Harvard from 2015 to 2018. With Computer Science and Statistical colleagues, he founded Harvard University's Masters in Data Science in 2018 and the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

Publications

Representative articles