Sprott’s Mohamed Al Guindy awarded funding from the CFI John R. Evans Leaders Fund
Mohamed Al Guindy, assistant professor of finance at the Sprott School of Business, has been successful in the latest round of research infrastructure funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).
Mohamed is one of 10 Carleton University researchers receiving infrastructure funding for his research program; this marks the first ever CFI grant at the Sprott School of Business. This infrastructure grant will bring in tremendous computing power and will position Carleton University as a global leader in the exciting area of social media and finance.
Mohamed’s research develops a novel network representation of the economy, accounting for all the intricate relationships and connections among firms. His research will explore how economic shocks travel within the economy and how they impact surrounding or neighbouring firms. These issues are important to the understanding of financial crises as well as the understanding of shocks to the economy – including shocks due to COVID-19.
These networks of the economy are captured and updated by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd of tens of millions of investors tweeting hundreds of millions of financial tweets about firms. Such approach ensures that the network representation captures the various economic connections among firms as seen by a large number of investors. Moreover, these networks evolve over time, and do so rapidly in response to financial and economic changes.
This mapping out of the economy and investigation of shocks will be vital to public institutions and policy makers, regulators, researchers, risk managers, investors, and financial market participants. As this research will shed light on how shocks propagate in the economy, and which firms or clusters of firms are most central/influential, it gives policymakers a context into which economic intervention programs can be most useful in reviving the economy – at times of recessions for example.
The funding received will strengthen and expand the capacity of the Social Media & Finance Lab at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business. The goal is to expand and transform the lab with exceptional computing and processing capacity – to process and analyze hundreds of millions of financial tweets, and to construct dynamic and time varying networks of the economy. The scope and the significant computing power will make this lab the first of its kind in Canada. We are very excited to be global leaders and pioneers in this emerging research endeavour.
“This funding is the first in the School’s history since the Sprott School of Business became a faculty in 2006,” states Shaobo Ji, Sprott’s associate dean of research. “It symbolizes Sprott’s achievement in research as a business school as CFI/JELF funding is predominantly given to science and engineering disciplines.”
To see examples of network representations of the economy, check out Mohamed’s research website.
About the Canada Foundation for Innovation
The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) is a non-profit corporation that invests in research infrastructure at Canadian universities, colleges, research hospitals and non-profit research institutions. Since its creation in 1997, the CFI has supported researchers with the cutting-edge facilities, laboratories and equipment they need to push the frontiers of knowledge in all disciplines, to discover and to innovate.
About the John R. Evans Leaders Fund
The John R. Evans Leaders Fund (JELF) is designed to help universities attract and retain the best researchers at a time of intense international competition. JELF offers institutions the opportunity to acquire infrastructure for their leading research faculty to undertake cutting-edge research and create competitive research support packages in the form of infrastructure and a portion of the operating and maintenance costs from the CFI, coupled with direct research costs from partner organizations.