Archive for Finance

Another Day, Another Elsevier Scandal

Posted in Finance with tags , , , , on February 26, 2026 by telescoper

Some weeks ago, in early January, I saw a story in the Irish Independent about Brian Lucey, a Professor in Trinity Business School. That story was subsequently featured in Retraction Watch which you can read if you can’t get past the paywall at the Irish Independent. It seems that 12 papers written by Professor Lucey were retracted after having been published in journals run by Elsevier for which Prof. Lucey was Editor in which capacity he made the final decision to publish them. Quoting from Retraction Watch:

“We can confirm these papers were retracted from 19 December to 23 December 2025,” an Elsevier spokesperson told us. “We uphold the highest standards of rigor and ethics in our publishing to protect the quality and integrity of research. Editors can publish in their journals as long as they are compliant to our policies. Please refer to our Publishing Ethics policies for further information regarding editorial conflicts of interests.”

The most surprising thing I learnt from this is that Elsevier apparently has a Publication Ethics policy!

Anyway, according to this piece by Chris Brunet, which includes a list of all the retracted papers, it seems this story has escalated considerably since January. The 12 papers mentioned above, all with Brian Lucey on their author list, had accumulated over five thousand citations between them. Prof. Lucey published 56 papers in 2025 – that’s a rate of more than one a week – raising suspicions that he has been adding his name to papers to which he made a minimal contribution. The previously-mentioned source also contains allegations of serious academic misconduct and other ethical violations, including the creation of a publishing and citation cartel.

Prof. Lucey has now been removed as an Editor from 5 journals: International Review of Financial Analysis, the International Review of Economics & Finance, Finance Research Letters, Financial Management, & Energy Finance. I don’t know if Prof. Lucey is subject to an internal investigation at Trinity College, Dublin, but he should be.

This episode is symptomatic of a commercial academic publishing industry which is rotten to the core, but which nobody seems willing to do anything about. I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that Elsevier owns Scopus, which passes itself off as a quality control agency for academic journals. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so outrageous.

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End of Term Thoughts

Posted in Biographical, Finance with tags , , , on May 4, 2018 by telescoper

Today is the last day of teaching term at Maynooth University. My last lecture, a revision lecture, was yesterday morning and I spent most of the afternoon helping students put the finishing touches on their project work, which is due in on Tuesday next week. Next Monday is a bank holiday in Ireland (as it is in the UK), then there’s a short period of private study before the examinations start next Friday. As it happens, the theory paper for the module I’ve been teaching on Computational Physics is on the first day of the examination period.

It’s `Study Week’ in Cardiff next week too, and I have a revision lecture there. Owing to the Monday holiday we’ve juggled the schedule a bit to ensure all modules have a revision lecture so I’m doing my revision lecture on Thursday rather than the usual Tuesday. I have a meeting at the Institute of Physics in London on Tuesday and it’s the Annual General Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society (also in London) on Friday so I’ll be spending all of next week in the UK, in between Cardiff and London. Since teaching is over I’m not planning any more midweek travel (unless it’s absolutely necessary) and intend to spend one week in the UK and one week in Ireland, and so on, apart from conferences and the like, until I fully relocate in July.

I thought I’d mention another thing, which represents a fortuitous bit of timing. Twenty-five years ago, while I was living in London, I took out a savings policy of the sort that involves making a regular monthly payment into a mixture of investment funds. The term of this policy was 25 years, and the maturity date was 23rd April 2018. On a couple of occasions I have been tempted to cash it in early but decided to let it run until maturity. The performance of my chosen funds has fluctuated over the last two and a half decades, but when the price of units drops and you invest a fixed cash amount you end up buying more units than when they’re expensive so if they do recover in value you do well. This is called Pound Cost Averaging.

However, when a policy like this reaches the end of its term the amount you get back depends on the value of the units on the day that it matures. Although my policy wasn’t doing at all well a decade ago, it seems my portfolio (more by luck than judgement) has done well over the last ten years, but with the stock market being rather volatile in the early part of this year it’s been a bit of a white knuckle ride recently. Thankfully the last few weeks seem to have been more stable, and although the units are not at an all-time high in terms of value they were not far off that when they were cashed in. aturity value turned out to be about three times the total amount I’ve invested. I received the money on 30th April, and the proceeds will make a significant contribution to the cost of purchasing a house here in Ireland.

The downside of pound cost averaging is that the final sum is paid in pounds to a UK bank account, and with the pound languishing against the euro there’s now a decision to be made about when to transfer it to Ireland..

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The UK Financial Contribution to the EU

Posted in Finance, Politics with tags , , on April 22, 2016 by telescoper

There’s so much misunderstanding and distortion flying around about the United Kingdom’s contribution to the European Budget and what it might be spent on if we left the EU that I just thought I would post this for information. It shows official figures from HMRC for 2014. Similar pie charts are available for other years, but often they include the EU contribution under “other” which is why I’ve chosen this particular one. Also, I’m very lazy and it came up first on Google…

fat cut

Although it’s a lot of money in cash terms, it’s very small compared to current expenditure on, e.g. Health, Education and Welfare and even compared to the interest payments on our national debt. Saving this contribution would not make sufficient financial resources  available to make a significant difference to these other big ticket  items. Note also that if the UK loses its current credit rating, the expense of servicing our debt will increase by an amount that could easily on its own wipe out the saving on our EU subscription.

And of course what we get for that relatively small contribution is access to beneficial trade agreements, inward investment from EU companies and other sources, and access to the science programmes. You may disagree, of course, but I think it’s money very well spent.

 

 

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