07-26-2024
Tobias Moskowitz returned to Purdue this week to meet with a few familiar faces and give a seminar on a paper he coauthored with the Daniels School’s Kaushik Vasudevan, an assistant professor of finance.
Moskowitz, seen above with Purdue’s Tom and Patty Hefner Chair in Finance Mara Faccio, is a Daniels School alum, West Lafayette native and the inaugural Dean Takahashi ’80 B.A., ’83 M.P.P.M Professor of Finance at Yale’s School of Management. He’s also author of the 2012 bestselling book Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won, which uses economic principles to explain the hidden side of sports. Written with coauthor and veteran Sports Illustrated scribe L. Jon Wertheim, the book examines, among other topics, the influence home-field advantage has on the outcomes of games in all sports and why it exists; the subtle biases that umpires exhibit in calling balls and strikes in key situations; and why professional teams routinely overvalue draft picks.
In their paper “Betting Without Beta,” Moskowitz and Vasudevan use a novel setting, sports betting markets, to distinguish between bettor preferences and beliefs, and apply this analysis to better understand low risk anomalies in betting and financial markets.
They find that preferences for lottery-like payoffs, rather than incorrect beliefs, drive the lower returns to betting on risky underdogs versus safe favorites.
Moskowitz earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial management and industrial engineering in 1993 from Purdue, and his master’s in management from the business school in 1994. He earned his PhD in finance from UCLA. He was the Fama Family Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business before joining the faculty ranks at Yale. At Yale he teaches sports analytics, quantitative investments, and applied quantitative finance. His father, Herb Moskowitz, served on Purdue’s business school faculty for 37 years.
