Vale Professor Michael John McAleer

Professor Michael John McAleer passed away on 8 July 2021, at the age of 68. He was a remarkable scholar with an enormous range of academic interests, the scope of which was quite breathtaking. His great industry and commitment to scholarship were exemplary. For over a decade, he had been engaged in a struggle with cancer, a circumstance he hardly mentioned, but it seemed to strengthen his resolve and his published output increased over the course of his life.

His research and publishing interests ranged across economics, econometrics, financial econometrics, finance, tourism economics, energy economics, the economics of patents, bibliometrics, and more recently, statistical aspects of COVID-19-related research.

At the time of his death, he held numerous academic positions, including University Research Chair Professor, Department of Finance, Asia University, Taiwan; Erasmus Visiting Professor of Quantitative Finance, Econometric Institute, Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Adjunct Professor, Department of Economic Analysis and ICAE, Complutense University of Madrid (founded 1293), Spain; Adjunct Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; and IAS Adjunct Professor, Institute of Advanced Sciences, Yokohama National University, Japan.

He had an Irish father and a Japanese mother and spent many of his formative years in Japan. This afforded him a fluency in Japanese and an affinity with Asian cultures. He held many visiting positions around the world and was a truly global scholar. He regularly was a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University and Osaka University, Japan; the University of Padova (founded in 1222), Italy, Complutense University of Madrid (founded in 1293), Spain; Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy; the University of Zurich, Switzerland; the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

He was the Editor-in-Chief of six international journals, and was a member of the editorial boards of more than forty international journals. He acted as the guest co-editor on numerous special issues of the Annals of Financial Economics (World Scientific), China Finance Review International (Emerald), Econometric Reviews (Taylor and Francis), Economic Record (Wiley), Energies (MDPI), Environmental Modelling and Software (Elsevier), International Review of Economics and Finance (Elsevier), Journal of Econometrics (Elsevier), Journal of Economic Surveys (Wiley), Journal of Risk and Financial Management (MDPI), Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (Elsevier), North American Journal of Economics and Finance (Elsevier), Risks (MDPI), and Sustainability (MDPI).

His total research output was phenomenal, with some 415 publications, some 6786 citations indicated on Publons and 1270 referenced pieces on Google Scholar, with some 23,273 citations. He was ranked 62 on REPEC for work in economics over the past 10 years, 46 globally on Google Scholar in econometrics, and 8 in Financial Econometrics. He conducted research with a vast network of global scholars and numerous research collaborators around the globe.

Michael published nearly 900 journal articles and books on economics, theoretical and applied financial econometrics, quantitative finance, risk and financial management, theoretical and applied econometrics, theoretical and applied statistics, time series analysis, energy economics and finance, sustainability, environmental modelling, carbon emissions, climate change econometrics, forecasting, informatics, data mining, bibliometrics, and the international rankings of journals and academics.

Since the onset of COVID-19 at the beginning of 2020, he also published more than 100 comments on papers published on the topic in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. This serves to indicate his enormous industry and the range of his academic interests. He will be greatly missed by all.