A Nobel Day for New York City
It was a good day for New York City. The Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to two professors - Roderick MacKinnon, a professor at Rockefeller University in NYC; and Peter Agre, a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. The Nobel Prize for Economics went to Robert Engle, a professor at my own alma mater, New York University. Sadly I never had a class with Professor Engle. Although I did study bankruptcy with Edward Altman. I doubt most people know who he is, but he is the man when it comes to bankruptcy. Back in the late 1960s he developed a little bankruptcy predictor model which has come to be known as Altman's Z Score. So prevalent is the use of the Z score for bankruptcy prediction that Bloomberg terminals automatically calculate it for public companies.