The professorship, established by University alumni Horty and Howard Kuehner, honors Horty Kuehner's deceased father, a longtime leader in the St. Louis banking community.

Siddhartha Chib, Ph.D.

"Professor Chib's pioneering work in the analysis of time series, and especially stochastic volatility, has advanced the scientific analysis of credit risk, the quintessential exposure of banks," said Stuart I. Greenbaum, Ph.D., dean of the Olin School. "Chib's work has also helped to facilitate the implementation of 'Value at Risk' models, widely used in assessing risk and performance of financial institutions."

Chib specializes in Bayesian statistics and econometrics and "Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods," concerned with simulation-based inference in generalized mathematical models of stochastic volatility.

In a recent paper on the topic, Chib and his co-authors extensively tested and validated the methodology on simulated data and then applied it to daily-returns data on the Standard & Poor's 500 stock market index. The paper also discussed how the likelihood function of these models can be computed by appropriate particle filter methods.

"Sid is one of the main reasons I chose to come to Olin," said Barton H. Hamilton, Ph.D., associate professor of economics, management and entrepreneurship in the Olin School. "I wanted to learn simulation-based statistical methods, and he is arguably the best in the field.

"He has been one of the leaders in developing Bayesian statistical methods that statisticians and econometricians use every day to analyze real data in a variety of fields, including economics and finance, to estimate and compare different models of behavior."

Chib served as a visiting professor at the business school from 1990-92. He joined the Olin School as associate professor of econometrics and statistics in 1992 and was made a full professor in 1995.

Previously, he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Chib earned a master's degree and doctorate in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara; a master of business administration degree from the Indian Institute of Management in India; and an undergraduate degree from St. Stephen's College at Delhi University in India.

Chib also serves as associate editor of several journals, including the Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Statistics and Computing and the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics.

He is the author of numerous studies and articles that have appeared in these journals and others, including American Statistician, Biometrika, Communications in Statistics, Theory and Methods, Empirical Economics, Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society.