Andrew Davidson, President, Andrew Davidson & Co., Inc., and Alexander Levin, Director of Financial Engineering, Andrew Davidson & Co., Inc.

Andrew Davidson is a financial innovator and leader in the development of financial research and analytics. He has worked extensively on mortgage-backed securities product development, valuation, and hedging. He is president of Andrew Davidson & Co., Inc., a New York firm specializing in the application of analytical tools to investment management, which he founded in 1992. He is co-author of the book Securitization: Structuring and Investment Analysis and Mortgage-Backed Securities, Investment Analysis & Valuation Techniques and has written numerous articles that have appeared in The Handbook of Mortgage-Backed Securities, Mortgage-Backed Securities: New Applications and Research and The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. He received an MBA in Finance at the University of Chicago and a BA in Mathematics and Physics at Harvard.

Alex Levin is Director of Financial Engineering at Andrew Davidson & Co., Inc. He has developed innovative and efficient valuation models for MBS, including the Active-Passive Decomposition burnout model, the concept of prepay risk-and-option-adjusted valuation, and the method of Credit OAS and non-Monte Carlo shortcuts. His recent work focuses on the valuation of instruments exposed to credit risk, home-price modeling, and projects related to the MBS crisis. Alex has been a guest speaker at both academic and practitioner events and has published a number of papers. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from Naval Engineering Institute, Leningrad, and a Ph.D. in Control and Dynamic Systems from Leningrad State University.

"Mortgage Valuation Models delivers much more than its title suggests. It explores the key aspects of the mortgage market that ultimately were a trigger of the financial crisis. It offers potential policy solutions to remedy deficiencies in the current market structures. Most of all, though, alongside its very rigorous treatment of the technical details of mortgage models, it provides frequent illustrations and guidance that will help readers to avoid having unrealistically high expectations of their mortgage models." - Mark Adelson, Chief Strategy Officer, BondFactor Company