Published Writing

Time-zone Arbitrage in United States Mutual Funds: Damaging to Financial Integration between the United States, Asia and Europe

Historically, United States mutual funds have often calculated their asset values for international mutual funds using stale prices, because some fund components finish trading before the market closes. This resulted in daily fund returns becoming predictable. This paper quantitatively traces the history of this phenomenon, known as time-zone arbitrage (TZA), in various mutual funds, particularly the Vanguard Fund Family, before and after the phenomenon became well known.

An Avalanche is coming: Higher Education and the revolution ahead

This wide-ranging essay aims to provoke creative dialogue and challenge complacency in our traditional higher education institutions.

More Credit with Fewer Crises: Responsibly Meeting the world’s growing demand for credit

To support economic development, global credit levels must grow substantially over the next decade. At the same time, public and private decision-makers must avoid a repeat of the credit excesses that recently brought the world financial system to its knees. Can the world’s growing demand for credit be met responsibly, sustainably – and with fewer crises.

Education Writing

Evaluating and Assessing Tools in the digital swamp

Discover a powerful tool for navigating the ever-expanding digital swamp. The Digital Swamp Index will help educators wade through digital innovations in order to uncover tools that truly accelerate student achievement. Explore how to use the index to effectively implement technology and address the revolution occurring in education, which is generating a new nature of learning.

Beyond the Mirage

How pragmatic stewardship could transform learning outcomes in international education systems.

Oceans of innovation

The economic and educational achievements of the Pacific region in the past 50 years are spectacular - unprecedented in fact. They lay a foundation for the next 50 years - a much better foundation than exists in many Atlantic systems - but the mix of factors that brought those achievements will not be capable of meeting the challenge ahead.

Transforming Education in Pakistan

In 2011 I had an opportunity to work with government of Punjab, Pakistan to reform it’s education system. Life has never been the same.

I landed in Lahore in February 2011, and started as the initial team member on what would become one of the fastest education systems in the world. The results have now been documented and are tried to be replicated around the world.

Through a combination of ambitious goal-setting, structured collaboration, international experience, use of evidence and sheer persistence, the Punjab Education Reform Roadmap has begun to achieve notable results in a short time.

• After January 2013 there are approaching one and a half million extra children aged 5-16 enrolled in school.

• Teacher guides with lesson plans for each day in the basic subjects have been distributed to all 60,000 government schools (and taken up by many others) and almost 200,000 primary teachers have been trained to use them.

• The percentage of schools visited each month by administrators has increased from 22 per cent to 97 per cent.

• Every single district is now above the provincial average when the baseline was set two years ago and 31 districts now have 90 per cent attendance. None did in September 2011. This means 35,000 extra teachers are at schools each day and 800,000 more students have a teacher to teach them.