Curriculum Vitae

 Gary Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College.

Address

Economics Department

Pomona College

Claremont, California 91711

(909) 607-3135; gsmith@pomona.edu

Education

B.S. with Distinction in Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College, 1967

M.Phil. in Economics, Yale University, 1969

Ph.D. in Economics, Yale University, 1971

Employment:

Assistant Professor, Cowles Foundation and Yale University, 1971-1978

Associate Professor, University of Houston, and Visiting Associate Professor, Rice University, 1978-1981

Fletcher Jones Professor, Pomona College, 1981-

Honors and Grants:

Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, 1967-1968

Yale University Fellowships, 1968-1971

Social Science Research Council Grant, 1973

Yale Junior Faculty Fellowship, 1978

Stanford Research Institute Grant, 1978-1979

Pew Foundation Grant, 1991

Pomona College Wig Teaching Awards, 1992, 1998

Ford Foundation grants, 1994, 1995

NSF grant for an economics computer lab, 1995-97

Mellon Foundation Grant, 1996

Irvine Foundation Grants, 1996, 1997

Sontag Fellowships, 1996-2006

Haynes Foundation Fellowships, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2006, 2011

Published Papers

Comments on the FRB-MIT Model, in The Brookings Model: Perspective and Recent Developments, Gary Fromm and Lawrence Klein, editors, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1975, 568-572.

Pitfalls in Financial Model Building: A Clarification, The American Economic Review, June 1975, 510-516.

Okun's Law Revisited, The Quarterly Review of Economics and Business, Winter 1975, 37-57.

The Value of A Priori Information in Estimating a Financial Model, with William Brainard, Journal of Finance, December 1976, 1299-1322.

Dynamic Models of Portfolio Behavior: Comment on Purvis, American Economic Review, June 1978, 410-416

Reviews of Patric Hendershott, Understanding Capital Markets, Volume I, and Arnold Sametz and Paul Wachtel, editors, Understanding Capital Markets, Volume II, in Journal of Monetary Economics, August 1978, 560-566.

The Effect of Population Growth on Wealth and Saving in the Modigliani-Brumberg Life Cycle Model, Economics Letters, Volume 1, No. 1, 1978, 39-43.

Mixed Estimation as Generated Data, Economics Letters, 1978, 331-335

A Short-Run Two-Sector Model with Immobile Capital, with William Starnes, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, February 1979, 47-67.

The Long-Run Consequences of Monetary and Fiscal Policies When the Government's Budget is Not Balanced, Journal of Public Economics, February 1979, 59-80.

A Critique of Some Ridge Regression Methods, with Frank Campbell, Journal of the American Statistical Association, with discussion and rejoinder, March 1980, pp. 74-103. (Journal of the American Statistical Association invited Theory and Methods Paper for the 1979 meetings of the American Statistical Association).

The Long-Run Implications of a Two-Sector Model with Immobile Capital, De Economist, 1980, 50-74.

Further Evidence on the Value of A Priori Information, Journal of Finance, March 1980, 181-189.

A Model of U.S. Financial and Nonfinancial Economic Behavior, with David Backus, William Brainard, and James Tobin, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, May 1980, 259-293.

Equilibrium and Disequilibrium Interpretations of the IS-LM Model, De Economist, 1980, 497-529.

A Dynamic IS-LM Simulation Model, Applied Economics, September 1980, 313-327.

An Example of Ridge Regression Difficulties, The Canadian Journal of Statistics, 1980, 217-225.

The Systematic Specification of a Full Prior Covariance Matrix for Asset Demand Equations, Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1981, 317-339.

Review of Aleksander Markowski, An Unformalized Forecasting Model, in Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, February 1981, 118-121.

Investment and q in a Stock Valuation Model, Southern Economic Journal, April 1981, 59-79.

Monetarism, Bondism, and Inflation, Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, May 1982, 278-286.

A Simple Model for Estimating Intrinsic Value, Journal of Portfolio Management, Summer 1982, 46-49.

Flexible Policies and IS-LM Dynamics, Journal of Macroeconomics, Spring 1982, 155-178.

Disequilibrium Models of Financial Institutions, with William Brainard, Journal of Finance, December 1982, 1277-1293.

Estimating Intrinsic Value, American Association of Individual Investors Journal, September 1983, 28-32.

Comment on Ben Friedman, in Corporate Capital Structures, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Nominal and Real Required Returns in Present Value Analysis, Engineering Economist, Summer 1988, 331-348.

Review of Dorian Owen, Money, Wealth and Expenditure: Integrated Modelling of Consumption and Portfolio Behavior, in Journal of Economic Literature, December 1989, 1691-1693.

Coping with the Term Structure, in Money, Macroeconomics, and Economic Policy: Essays in Honor of James Tobin, William C. Brainard, William D. Nordhaus, and Harold W. Watts, editors, Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1991, 205-232.

Macroeconomic Modeling of Money, Credit, and Banking, with Iman Anabtawi, Eastern Economic Journal, Summer 1994, 275-290.

Learning to Speak and Speaking to Learn, College Teaching, Spring 1997, 49-51.

Do Statistics Test Scores Regress Toward the Mean?, Chance, Winter 1997, 42-45.

Can the Famous Really Postpone Death?, With Heather Royer, Social Biology, Fall-Winter 1998, 302-305.

Learning Statistics by Doing Statistics, Journal of Statistics Education, November 1998.

Statistics for Liberal Arts Students, 1998 Proceedings of the Section on Statistical Education, American Statistical Association, 1999, 172-177.

Are Jewish Deathdates Affected by the Timing of Holidays?, with Peter Lee, Social Biology, 47 (Spring-Summer 2000), 127–134.

Career Trajectories in Baseball, with Teddy Schall, Chance, fall 2000, 35–38.

Do Baseball Players Regress toward the Mean?, with Teddy Schall, The American Statistician, 54, November 2000, 231-235 (also 1999 Proceedings of the Section on Statistics in Sports, American Statistical Association, 2000, 8-13).

Exercise-Induced Bronchoconstriction Prevalence in Collegiate Cross-Country Runners, with Robert Tucker Thole, Robert E. Sallis, and Aaron L. Rubin, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 33, 2001, 1641–1646.

Comparing Sports Injuries in Men and Women, with Robert E. Sallis, Kirk Jones, Sam Sunshine, and Lauren Simon, International Journal of Sports Medicine, 22, 2001, 420–423.

The Nifty-Fifty Revisited, with Jeff Fesenmaier, Journal of Investing, 11, 2002, 86-90.

Regression to the Mean and Football Wagers, with Marcus Lee, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 15, 2002, 329–342.

Scared to Death?, British Medical Journal, 325, 2002, 1442-1443.

Horseshoe Pitchers’ Hot Hands, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 2003, 753-758.

Asian-American Deaths Near the Harvest Moon Festival, Psychosomatic Medicine, 66, 2004, 378-381.

Idler and Kasl’s p Values: A Cautionary Lesson, Psychosomatic Medicine, 66, 2004, 373-375.

Bowlers’ Hot Hands, with Reid Dorsey-Palmateer, The American Statistician, 58, 2004, 38-45.

Shrunken Earnings Predictions are Better Predictions, with Margaret H. Smith and Manfred Keil, Applied Financial Economics, 14 (13), 2004, 937-943.

Is a House a Good Investment?, with Margaret H. Smith, Journal of Financial Planning, 17, 2004, 67-75.

Regression to the Mean in Average Test Scores, with Joanna Smith, Educational Assessment, 10, 2005, 377-399.

Monogrammic Determinism?, with Stilian Morrison, Psychosomatic Medicine, 67, 2005, 820-824.

The Five Elements and Chinese-American Mortality, Health Psychology, 25 (1), 2006, 124-129.

A Great Company Can be a Great Investment, with Jeff Anderson, Financial Analysts Journal, 62 (4), 2006, 86-93.

Bubble, Bubble, Where's the Housing Bubble, with Margaret Hwang Smith, presented at the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, March 30-31, 2006; subsequently published in Brooking Papers on Economic Activity, 2006: 1, 1-50.

The Next Best Thing to Knowing Someone Who is Usually Right, with Joseph Steinberg and Robert Wertheimer, Journal of Wealth Management, 9 (3), 2006, 51-60.

Measuring and Controlling Shortfall Risk in Retirement, with Donald Gould, Journal of Investing, 16 (1) 2007, 82-95.

Shrunken Interest Rate Forecasts are Better Forecasts, with Reid Dorsey-Palmateer, Applied Financial Economics, 17, 2007, 425-430.

Homeownership in an Uncertain World with Substantial Transaction Costs, with Margaret Hwang Smith, Journal of Regional Science, 47 (5), 2007, 881-896.

The Real Dogs of the Dow, with Anita Aurora and Lauren Capp, The Journal of Wealth Management, 10 (4), 2008, 64-72.

Ocular Injury Rates in College Sports, with J. Youn, R.E. Sallis, and, K. Jones, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 40 (3), 2008, 428-432.

Tobin’s q, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, second edition, Larry Blume and Steven N. Durlauf, eds., Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Harvesting Capital Gains and Losses, with Margaret Hwang Smith, Financial Services Review, 17 (4), 2008, 309-321.

Would a Stock By Any Other Ticker Smell as Sweet?, with Alex Head and Julia Wilson, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 49 (2), 2009, 551-561

First Names and Longevity, with Laura Pinzur, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 108, 2009, 149-160.

Poker Player Behavior After Big Wins and Big Losses, with Michael Levere and Robert Kurtzman, Management Science, 55 (9), 2009, 1547-1555.

Birth Month is Not Related to Suicide among Major League Baseball Players, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 112 (1), 2011, 55-60.

Another Look at Baseball Player Initials and Longevity, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 112 (1), 2011, 211-216.

The Two-Child Paradox Reborn?, with Stephen Marks, Chance, 24 (1), 2011, 54-59.

The Baseball Hall of Fame is Not the Kiss of Death, Death Studies, 35, 2011, 949-955

Do People Whose Names begin with “D” Really Die Young?, Death Studies, 36, 2012, 182-189.

Like Mother, Like Daughter?: A Socioeconomic Comparison of Immigrant Mothers and Daughters, with Margaret Hwang Smith, International Migration, 51, 2013, 181-190.

Tax-Loss Selling and the Year-End Behavior of Dow Jones Stocks, with Jeff Levere and Max Gold, Accounting and Finance Research, 2 (1), 2013, 40-46.

Why Are Some Home Values Resistant and Others Resilient?, International Real Estate Review, 17 (2), 2014, 223-240.

Great Companies: Looking for Success Secrets in All the Wrong Places, with Gabrielle Baum, Journal of Investing, 24 (3), 2015, 61-72.

Sunny Upside? The Relationship Between Sunshine and Stock Market Returns, with Michael Zurhellen, Review of Economic Analysis, 7, 2015, 173-183.

A Fallacy That Will Not Die, Journal of Investing, 25 (1), 2016, 7-15

Hurricane Names: A Bunch of Hot Air?, Weather and Climate Extremes, 12, 2016, 80-84.

Great Company, Great Investment Revisited, Journal of Wealth Management, 2016, 19 (1), 34-39.

Overreaction of Dow Stocks, Cogent Economics & Finance—Taylor & Francis, 2016, 4(1), 1251831.

Stocks Should be Valued With a Term Structure of Required Returns, with Albert Xu, Journal of Investing, 2017, 26 (2), 61-68.

Three Value-Investing Benchmarks, American Association of Individual Investors Journal, 2017.

Estimation of the Demand for Construction Aggregate, Natural Resource Modeling, 2017: e12144.

Another Look at Dollar Cost Averaging, with Heidi Margaret Artigue, Journal of Investing, 2018, 27 (2) 66-75.

Companies are Seldom as Good or as Bad as They Seem at the Time, in Guzman, M. Ed. Toward a Just Society: Joseph Stiglitz and Twenty-First Century Economics, Columbia University Press, 2018, 95-110.

Effects Of A 12-week Cycling Training Program On Clinical Parameters In Patients With Parkinson Disease, with Zinta Zarins and Robert Sallis, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2018, 50 (5S), 490.

Step Away From StepWise, Journal of Big Data, 2018, 5 (32).

Overreaction in Football Wagers, with Andrew Capron, Big Data, 2018

Stock Splits: A Re-Evaluation, Journal of Investing, 2019, 28 (4) 21-29.

The Principal Problem with Principal Components Regression, with Heidi Margaret Artigue, Cogent Mathematics & Statistics, 2019, 6 (1).

Be Wary of Black Box Trading Algorithms, Journal of Investing, 2019, 28 (5) 7-15.

The Name Game: The Importance of Resourcefulness, Ruses, and Recall in Stock Ticker Symbols, with Naomi Baer and Erica Barry, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2020, 76 (1), 410-413.

The Chinese Real Estate Bubble, with Wesley Liang, Real Estate Finance, 2020, 36(4). 239-247.

Data Mining Fool's Gold, Journal of Information Technology, 2020.

The Paradox of Big Data, Springer Nature: Applied Sciences, 2020, 2 (1041).

Physical inactivity is associated with a higher risk for severe COVID-19 outcomes: a study in 48 440 adult patients, with Robert Sallis, Deborah Rohm Young, Sara Y. Tartof, James Sallis, Jeevan Sall, Qiaowu Li, and Deborah Cohen, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2021.

Statistical Significance Versus Practical Importance in Information Systems Research, with Ananya Sen and Claire Van Note, Journal of Information Technology, 2021.

The Promise and Peril of the Data Deluge for Historians, Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 2021/2022, 6 (1-2), 277-287.

Earthquakes and Home Prices: The Napa and Ridgecrest Quakes, with James Jung, Journal of Housing Research, 2022.

Full moons and Forking Paths, Significance, 2022, 19(4), 32-35

Associations of Physical Inactivity and COVID-19 Outcomes Among Subgroups, with Deborah Rohm Young, James F. Sallis, Aileen Baecker, Deborah A. Cohen, Claudia L. Nau, and Robert E. Sallis, American Journal of Preventative Medicine, 2023, 64 (4) 492-502. Selected as the AJPM paper of the year. 

It May be a Mistake to Delay Social Security Benefits, with Margaret Smith, Journal of Financial Planning, 2024, 37(2), 56-62.

LLMs Can’t Be Trusted for Financial Advice, Journal of Financial Planning, 2024, 37(5), 64-75.

MPT and CAPM Mismeasure Risk, Journal of Investing, 2024, 33(4), 40-54.

Big Data and the Assault on Science, International Higher Education, , 2024, 120.


The Disappointing Performance of AI-Powered Funds, with Sam Wyatt, Journal of Investing, forthcoming.


Imprudent Prudence: Endowment Risk-Managers Don’t Need to Sacrifice Returns, Journal of Investing, forthcoming.

Textbooks

Money and Banking, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1982, 572 pages.

Macroeconomics, New York: W.H. Freeman, 1985, 579 pages.

Statistical Reasoning, Boston, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon, 1985; second edition, 1988; third edition, 1991, 908 pages.

Investments, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown/Scott, Foresman, 1990, 649 pages.

Money, Banking, and Financial Intermediation, Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1991, 724 pages.

Financial Assets, Markets, and Institutions, Lexington, Mass.: DC Heath, 1993, 872 pages.

Introduction to Statistical Reasoning, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998, 654 pages.

Essential Statistics, Regression, and Econometrics, Amsterdam: Elsevier/Academic Press, 2011; second edition 2015.

Tradebooks

Houseonomics, with Margaret Hwang Smith, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Financial Times/Prentice Hall Books, 2008, 214 pages.

Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics, Overlook/Duckworth, 2014. London Times Book of the Week. Translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish.

What the Luck? The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives, New York: Overlook/Duckworth, 2016. Translated into Chinese.

The Money Machine: The Surprisingly Simple Power of Value Investing, New York: Amacom Books (American Management Association). 2017.

The AI Delusion, Oxford University Press, 2018. Translated into Chinese for sale in Taiwan, simplified Chinese for sale in mainland China, Korean, and Vietnamese.

The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science, with Jay Cordes, Oxford University Press, 2019.Winner of the 2020 PROSE Award for Popular Science & Popular Mathematics. Translated into simplified Chinese for sale in mainland China.

The Phantom Pattern Problem, The Mirage of Big Data, with Jay Cordes, Oxford University Press, 2020.

Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, Oxford University Press, 2023.

The Power of Modern Value Investing: Beyond Indexing, Algos, and Alpha, with Margaret Smith, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

Reboot: A Business Novel of Money, Finance, and Love, with Margaret Smith, BEP, in press.

Standard Deviations: The truth about flawed statistics, AI and big data, Duckworth, in press. (Revision of Standard Deviations).

Software

A Banking Game: students manage a bank in competition with three computer-managed banks.

Financial Decision Simulation: the simulation model used in Economics 158, Financial Decisionmaking; student teams manage competing financial intermediaries in real historical scenarios.

Macro Policy Simulation: the simulation model used in Economics 101, intermediate macroeconomics; student teams manage a nation's monetary and fiscal policies.

Smith's Financial Package: extremely user-friendly computational software for Economics 156, Security Valuation and Portfolio Theory; also includes programs that can be used for personal financial planning.

Smith's Statistical Package: extremely user-friendly computational software for Economics 57, economics statistics.

StatGames: computer games that help students develop their statistical reasoning.

StatQuiz: interactive multiple-choice questions to help students test and refine their statistical reasoning.