Random Economist- M. Ali Khan

M. Ali Khan from John Hopkins;

I continue to pursue interests in economic interaction, as formalized in general equilibrium theory: models with a representative agent, as well as those with a finite number and a continuum. In particular, those situations in which an individual agent is "numerically negligible" but is nevertheless influenced by actions, or summary statistics of actions, of all other agents in the game, and where individual and social outcomes are uncertain.

Questions of risk and uncertainty have led me to models of asset-pricing, again with an arbitrary index set of assets. In collaboration with Professor Yeneng Sun, I am exploring questions having to do with arbitrage and with the distinction between systematic and idiosyncratic risk. We hope that this work in financial economics will also lead to applications in other applied fields such as cost-benefit analysis for economic development.

I see issues in development economics alongside those in methodology and the history of ideas. Interests in population, education and the environment have led me to consider the robustness of disciplinary boundaries, and more broadly, to the relationship between economic development and cultural change. Which subsumes the question of how markets handle, or fail to handle, basic issues of resource allocation; and has also led me to the Scottish Enlightenment, and to the "economics of the eighteenth century."

My interests in theory and epistemology are complemented by those in mathematics, where I am working with methods of nonstandard analysis (Loeb spaces), nonsmooth analysis and optimization (Mordukhovich-Ioffe cones), and stochastic processes (law of large numbers with a continuum of random variables).