The Works of Alexei Orlov, SEC

Ph.D. economist Alexei Orlov is a financial economist at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a job he has held since 2015. He is also a scholar who continues to research the international financial markets and fixed income securities. He also conducts financial simulations with different variables and forecasts economic events.

Alexei Orlov’s Career

Dr. Orlov’s economist career started in 2002 where he worked as an assistant professor at Radford University after earning his Ph.D. He became an associate professor in 2006 before becoming a full-fledged professor position in 2013. It was while working at the university that he landed his job at the SEC in 2015.

Although Dr. Orlov briefly took up another role as the financial economist in the Strategy and Competition Division at the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority in 2019, he has retained his job at the SEC to date.

Alexei Orlov’s Published Works

Dr. Alexei Orlov has written several published works throughout his career, some by himself and others in collaboration with other authors. Here is a sample of the publications:

#1

Alexei Orlov wrote An application of the Black–Litterman model with EGARCH-M-derived views for international portfolio management in 2007 in collaboration with S. L. Beach. The authors sought to provide an application for the Black-Litterman methodology in portfolio management in a global setting.

In their case, Orlov and Beach turned the GARCH-derived views into inputs for the model. They found that the returns on portfolios surpassed the kinds that rely on the market equilibrium weights. The authors found that they could use the Black-Litterman model in designing international investment strategies.

#2

In the 2012 paper, Spatial Modeling of Stock Market Comovements Orlov collaborated with G. Fernandez-Aviles and J. Montero. The authors used spatial techniques to model some complex international dependencies on the international financial markets in this article. They found that geographical proximity has no significant influence on the movements of the stock market. As such, economists could use simple FDI-based tools to measure financial distance.

#3

In the 2006 Capital Controls and Firm’s Dynamics article, Dr. Orlov constructed a dynamic multinational enterprise model to determine the extent of the effects of different capital control policies on a firm’s equity and debt positions. The model also investigated the MNE’s outputs and innovations at the subsidiary and headquarters position.

Dr. Alexei Orlov calibrated the model using IMF’s Exchange Arrangements and Restrictions and the United States FDI Benchmark Survey to reproduce the average US FDI and resulting technology flows to the foreign subsidiaries. He found that capital controls had a significant impact on MNE operations. When governments lift capital restrictions, capital and technology start to flow to the less developed countries, causing an increase in FDI flow and a boost of production.

#4

In the article Bond liquidity and dealer inventories, Dr. Orlov collaborated with P. Ivanov and M. Schicchi. They wrote the paper in 2020 after finding that the majority of the research conducted on corporate bonds to investigate liquidities and the dealers’ inventories at the time was only done on US-dominated securities. But, there are bonds traded in Europe, and TRACE reporting requirements do not limit their trades.

Using their access to TRACE and ZEN, which are part of the U.K.’s trade reporting system, Orlov, Ivanov, and Schicchi found tens of thousands of bonds overlap because they are traded in both the U.S. and Europe markets. They established a strong positive correlation between liquidity and inventories.

They also found that the effects on the securities offset each other. For example, while more significant inventories led to higher liquidity in the U.S., they caused lower liquidity in Europe.

The authors concluded that neither of the securities markets presented a complete picture of the effects dealer inventories had on the bond market’s liquidity. They also concluded that sharing data across the reporting databases would help the stakeholders develop a better and more accurate grasp of the liquidity of the inventories in the global bond markets.

#5

The article The Impact of Monetary Policy on Corporate Bonds under Regime Shifts was published in the Journal of Banking and Finance in 2017. For this one, Dr. Alexei Orlov worked with M. Guidolin and M. Pedio. The authors set out to study the effects of conventional monetary expansion, maturity extension programs, and quantitative easing on corporate bond yields.

The authors used impulse response functions to develop flexible models that would allow them to study the exchange rate regimes. With the help of the three-state Markov model and equal time-vector autoregressive coefficients, they found that unconventional policies have always been used to decrease corporate spreads and yields.

Although this is what policymakers look to achieve, the size of the estimated effects is a product of the assumptions investors make regarding the declining long-term government bond yields. Often, this effect is caused by the use of unconventional policies, which introduce uncertainty. In an already shaky regime, unconventional monetary policies do not yield any adverse effects on inflation.

Dr. Orlov has played a crucial role in expanding economics knowledge by testing out different variables, their extents, and interactions with other variables in different economies. Among the significant contributions is his contribution to understanding the interrelatedness of the securities in different markets such that instability in one economy produces an effect in another economy.

Dr. Alexei Orlov is still working on other papers. He continues to contribute towards the expansion of knowledge of various economic phenomena and concepts.