What is your main research topic? Two-sided markets, venture capital markets. Does this visit at TSE help you to advance your research project(s)? Yes. Do you like the academic environment here? Is it very different from that of UAB? What are the main differences? Yes, I like the dynamic academic environment here. I am quite impressed to see that PhD students take such active roles in it, organizing workshops, publishing magazines etc. It’s quite exciting. Overall, are you enjoying this experience? Would you recommend to other students to visit another university for some months during their PhD studies? Do you want to add anything else about your experience? Yes, this visiting term has been great experience, I am all for it! My main research interests focus on Industrial Organization, Toulouse is the best place for me to spend my visiting opportunity. I am very grateful to the highly motivated, inspiring and friendly atmosphere. Also, Toulouse is a very beautiful city, a place to enjoy life. What is your main research topic? My research focuses on the political economy of violence in the Naxalite conflict in India. I am attempting to study the causes of the unprecedented escalation of the ongoing conflict in the Indian heartland. Other projects involve (a) studying how land and community rights affect violence in this area (b) identifying the role of information and networks in the rights based approach to development. Did this visit help you to advance your research project(s)? I am visiting UC Berkeley for the spring semester this year. The faculty at UC Berkeley is vast and diverse and one has access to people from departments other than economics. Many people here work on India and it has been useful to talk to them. Since my research studies political violence, I have benefitted from the Political Science department a lot. The faculty at the Center for Effective Global Action at UC Berkeley has helped me in my methodological issues. I found my meetings with different professors especially helpful. Did you like the academic environment there? Is it very different from that of TSE? What are the main differences? I like the academic and general environment at UC Berkeley. The faculty is very open and friendly. One big difference from TSE is that at UC Berkeley one has access to courses and people from other departments like law, political science, math etc. There are also many RA opportunities available for PhD students here. Most students in their first two years are doing part time RA work for a professor or an institution. The library is phenomenal here with a huge collection of books on economics and related fields. It opens untill 2 am on weekdays and 12 am on weekends and one can issue 200 books at a time. The PhD students also get 24/7 access to the department. The economics department is not as big as TSE but each week we have at least 10 seminars. My development group meets every week for a lunch talk where students and faculty present their ongoing work and there is another seminar for finished papers. Similar structure exists for other sub fields also. Overall, have you enjoyed this experience? Would you recommend to other TSE students to visit another university for some months during their PhD studies? Do you want to add anything else about your experience? I am enjoying my stay at UC Berkeley. Apart from the academics, the campus also offers many cultural events. I have an interest in western classical music and each week the department of Music offers quality free concerts. UC Berkeley has an excellent sports and recreation center. The bay area in general has many opportunities for music, hiking, good food etc. I would surely recommend other PhD students to visit another University during their PhD studies. What is your main research topic? My work falls into two fields of economics: (applied) Microeconomic Theory and Political Economy. My job market paper is on the topic of Persuasion. Games of Persuasion consider instances in which a decision-maker must make a decision in a risky environment. To inform this decision, better-informed but self-interested experts are asked to provide information. Although the fact that experts are biased is a concern, it is typically thought that relying on polarized experts helps reaching a satisfying outcome. I revisit this issue in a model that puts emphasis on the incentives experts have to gather information. What I find is somewhat surprising since I show that when polarized experts have high stakes in the decision, which is being made, it can be the case that there is generally little diversified information being provided. The benefits typically associated to polarization are diminished. I am currently working on an empirical strategy to test the model’s predictions using data on Civil litigation. I am also working on a series of papers, together with fellow TSE student Simone Meraglia, investigating the determinants of political and economic institutions. In these projects, we are particularly interested in the role played by the threat of expropriation by the state (e.g. the military, the bureaucracy) in the shaping of institutions. Our main contention is that market economies are fragile in that the created wealth is easily appropriable. As a result, to foster trade and extract large revenue from taxation, the state has no choice but to grant political institutions to curb its own strength. We make the case that this logic explains particularly well the grant of autonomy to towns involved in trade in Medieval times. Did this visit help you to advance your research project(s)? Absolutely. It allowed me to discuss my work with some of the leading researchers in my fields by giving talks in various universities and U.S. conferences. On that note, I found that coming from Toulouse usually facilitated these interactions: TSE students enjoy a good reputation abroad. This experience also helped me understand better what made a good job market paper. For instance, the great emphasis put on empirical relevance convinced me to test some of the predictions of my model on Persuasion. Finally, I made great use of Harvard’s library to have immediate access to History books relevant for my work on Institutions. Did you like the academic environment there? Is it very different from that of TSE? What are the main differences? I did like the academic environment at Harvard, although I wouldn’t say that it is very different from that of TSE. Several differences between Harvard and TSE do however come to my mind. PhD students are supervised by several Faculty members there, which I think is a good way of fostering student-faculty relations and having students work on both theoretical and empirical analyses of their topics. I also think it is much more common for PhD students to work as research assistants, which is a good way of developing research skills early in the PhD. On the other hand, students in Toulouse seem to cooperate more and better amongst themselves. In terms of teaching, greater emphasis seems to be put on the acquisition of modeling tools in Toulouse. Overall, did you enjoy this experience? Do you recommend to other TSE students to visit another university for some months during their PhD studies? Do you want to add anything else about your experience? My spell at Harvard was a tremendously positive experience and I certainly recommend such experiences to other students in Toulouse. I think it is best to do such a visit in the third year of the program, once a field of research has already been chosen. As a last piece of advice, I recommend to TSE students visiting other departments to present frequently in seminars, as this is the best way of connecting with fellow students and Faculty members. Staying anonymous in big departments is easy! What is your main research topic? I am interested in macro and finance and, more precisely, I am working on a topical subject: sovereign debt. A recent argument for explaining why countries honor their debt is the presence of internal costs of default: debt is usually in the form of bonds partially held by domestic residents. Thus, when defaulting, a sovereign inflicts damage to its own country. My research tends to explain why the government cannot perfectly make up for such internal costs, using, for example, bailouts or any other forms of compensation. This has some implications for domestic financial development and its degree of complexity or opacity, through, for example, credit derivatives or interbank markets. Because of these markets, governments have difficulties to assess precisely domestic exposures, and so they are unable to make up for internal cost of default. It is not ex post desirable, but ex ante, this allows the government to credibly commit. Now, I am considering other forms of bailouts: why does a country want to bail out another country? In concrete terms, why do European countries want to (at least partially) save Greece or Portugal? Did this visit help you to advance your research project(s)? Yes! It did help me a lot and it is still helping me for my research. First of all, visiting another department, wherever it may be, forces to present to other faculties or students ideas or projects that have had already been presented. That helped me to ask once again some questions and to reformulate some results in a new and, sometimes, more interesting way. It was also useful because after one year of full-time research, I had the feeling that I had accumulated a lot of questions or ideas without having sufficiently ordered them. For sure, no need to say that I have also received a lot of new advices and comments on my research, and, on top of that, I had the opportunity to work on new topics leading to new research projects. Did you like the academic environment there? Is it very different from that of TSE? What are the main differences? The academic environment is exceptional at MIT, even though, in general it might seem not fundamentally different compared with TSE. There are a lot of high-quality seminars and workshops. Possibilities of interactions with faculties or other students are numerous. However, at MIT as in Toulouse, these interactions arise only because I created them. In overall, did you enjoy this experience? Do you recommend to other TSE students to visit another university for some months during their PhD studies? Do you want to add anything else about your experience? I really enjoy my visit at MIT and I do recommend to TSE students to make visits during their PhD. I really think that this is a necessary experience for doing research, especially in economic sciences where it is usually about presenting and sharing ideas. |
Archives
Octobre 2016
Categories
Tout
|