His research interests are in statistics, financial econometrics, asset pricing and risk management. His work includes contributions in statistical factor analysis, high-frequency statistics, credit risk modeling and management compensation. He is particularly interested in how systematic risk factors and tail risk in the form of jumps influence the price of assets and the incentives of agents. For this purpose he has developed various statistical tools to estimate unknown risk factors from large dimensional data sets and from high-frequency data. He uses them empirically to predict asset prices and construct trading strategies. Markus received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He has a Diplom in Mathematics and a Diplom in Economics from the University of Bonn in Germany.