Research and publications.
A doctoral programme and a set of peer-reviewed papers that asked whether corporate risk practice holds up under evidence, plus earlier award-winning work in transport simulation and emissions measurement, and behavioural finance. Every finding below is the answer to a question about whether something actually works.
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Google Scholar, September 2026.
The Question
Airlines spend heavily to hedge jet fuel, which can be a third to a half of operating cost, yet several major carriers accumulated billions in hedging losses in the same decade. Whether the practice creates or destroys value was genuinely contested. My doctoral programme at the University of Sydney Business School set out to answer it with data rather than theory.
Three papers came out of it. The first re-examined risk management theory across a global panel of airlines and found that financial hedging reduces earnings volatility without raising profitability. The second tested operational hedging through fleet and engine commonality across eighty carriers and found it lowers operating cost but cannot stand alone. The third built a historical-simulation model of the cash collateral a futures-based hedge actually requires, and showed that collateral cost offsets much of the benefit. Alongside them, a survey of sixty-two airlines in twenty-eight countries linked hedging behaviour to institutional and cultural drivers of risk appetite.
The habit the programme built, asking whether accepted practice survives the evidence, is the one I have applied to everything since.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
2019
Flying with(out) a safety net: Financial hedging in the airline industry
Rico Merkert and Hassan Swidan
Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, volume 127, pages 206 to 219
Re-examines risk management theory in the airline context across a global panel and tests whether hedging fuel, foreign exchange and interest-rate exposure pays. Financial hedging reduces EBIT-margin volatility; it does not raise profitability.
2019
The relative effect of operational hedging on airline operating costs
Hassan Swidan and Rico Merkert
Transport Policy, volume 80, pages 70 to 77
Across a sample of eighty global airlines, operational hedging through engine commonality significantly reduces operating cost, but it does not work as a standalone strategy for jet fuel risk. Deployed alongside financial derivatives, the combination lowers unit cost and raises profitability.
2019
Designing optimal jet fuel hedging strategies for airlines: Why hedging will not always reduce risk exposure
Hassan Swidan, Rico Merkert and Oh Kang Kwon
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, volume 130, pages 20 to 36
Builds a historical-simulation Value at Risk model of the cash collateral a futures-based hedge requires. The collateral cost is large enough to offset much of the financial benefit, which is why hedging will not always reduce an airline’s risk exposure.
2014
Good rich, bad rich: Perceptions about the extremely wealthy and their sources of wealth
Lyle Sussman, David Dubofsky, Alan S. Levitan and Hassan Swidan
International Journal of Business and Social Research, volume 4, pages 44 to 58
A large-sample survey study of how people perceive the extremely wealthy, and how those perceptions depend on attributions about how the wealth was earned.
Theses
2019 (conferred 2020)
Financial Risk Management and Hedging Strategies in International Airlines: A Theoretical and Practical Perspective
Hassan Swidan
Doctoral thesis, The University of Sydney Business School, Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies
Three essays and a global survey on whether hedging protects an airline: a panel analysis of financial and operational hedging across one hundred international carriers, a historical-simulation model of collateral cost, and a survey of sixty-two airlines across twenty-eight countries on the institutional and cultural drivers of hedging behaviour.
2011
Integrating AIMSUN Micro Simulation Model with Portable Emissions Measurement System (PEMS): Calibration and Validation Case Study
Hassan Swidan
Master of Science thesis, North Carolina State University
Built a vehicle-to-vehicle communication representation into the AIMSUN microscopic traffic simulator through a custom interface, calibrated its fuel and emissions models against real-world Portable Emissions Measurement System data, and validated the result on a real network under incident conditions.
Award-Winning Paper
2011
Simulation-Based Methodology for Assessing Environmental Impacts of Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications
Hassan Swidan, Nagui Rouphail, Hyejung Hu and H. Christopher Frey
Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting, Washington DC, 23 to 27 January 2011. Submitted for publication and presentation; presented as a research poster.
Built a simplified real-world network in the AIMSUN microscopic traffic simulator to test what vehicle-to-vehicle communication does to fuel consumption and emissions, with and without a major incident. V2V improved both mobility and environmental performance, with reductions approaching 40 per cent depending on the fuel or pollutant considered.
Award
Second place, Best Research Poster, Southeastern Transportation Center regional competition, held in conjunction with the Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting, Washington DC, January 2011. Hassan presented the poster.
ITRE newsletter, 2011
Conference Presentations
Institutions and hedging strategy in international airlines
Air Transport Research Society World Conference, Amsterdam
2018
Commercially optimal fuel hedging under market conditions
Air Transport Research Society World Conference, Seoul
2017
Operational versus financial hedging in airlines
Air Transport Research Society World Conference, Antwerp
2016
Academy of Management 76th Annual Meeting, Anaheim
2016
Financial risk management in airlines: literature review and empirical evidence
Air Transport Research Society World Conference, Rhodes
2011
Simulation-based methodology for assessing environmental impacts of vehicle-to-vehicle communications (poster; see the award-winning paper block above)
Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting, Washington DC
Why It Matters Now
The research question and the advisory question are the same question. Does hedging protect an airline. Does a hospital redesign shorten emergency stays. Does a national platform deliver the value claimed for it. Does an AI investment change anything a board would recognise as a result.
What the doctorate gave me was not a specialism in airline finance. It was a method: state the claim, find the data that could refute it, and report what the data says even when it disappoints the people who commissioned the work. That method is now applied to AI strategy, where confident-sounding analysis is cheap and evidence is not.
Links resolve to the publisher of record or the university repository.
Bring me a question worth testing.
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