UCLA Economics Professor Dora Costa’s book, The Evolution of Retirement was recently featured in The Atlantic. In the article, The Future of Work Is a 60-Year Career, the author references Costa’s book in relation to the current discussion regarding increasing the age at which people should retire.
This year UCLA participated in the Federal Reserve Challenge for the first time. The Fed Challenge is a nationwide competition among colleges and universities in which student-teams formulate a monetary policy recommendation and present it to judges from the Fed. The UCLA team finished first in its division and in the top 6 nationwide. The team was composed of Chris Surro (coach), Colleen Burns, David Hu, Jaden Locke, Richard Covrig and Rebecca De La O (presenters), Anna Verghese, Arif Abd Aziz, Jia Chen, Joleen Chiu, Matthew Craig, Michael Keily, Phoebe Chiu, Rawi Baransy, and Shane Hixon (research support). The press release from the Federal Reserve is available here: https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/other20211119a.htm
Michael Rubens
There are increasing worries about rising `market power’ of large corporations, both in the U.S.A. and across the globe. Powerful firms can reduce competition on many fronts. The usual worry is that insufficient competition harms consumers by pushing up prices and/or lowering product quality. A lack of competition can, however, also hurt workers if firms use their dominant position to lower prices paid for their inputs, such as labor or raw materials. When designing competition policy to ensure an even playing field, it is crucial to know where exactly firms exert their market power.
In his paper `Market Structure, Oligopsony Power, and Productivity’, Professor Michael Rubens investigates this question in the context of the Chinese tobacco industry. Industries that rely on agricultural products are generally vulnerable to the exertion of buyer power, because they often feature a limited set of final goods producers or processers who buy inputs from a large number of farmers. The main questions addressed are (i) whether Chinese cigarette firms mainly exert market power on cigarette or tobacco leaf markets, and (ii) how these different types of market power are affected by mergers and acquisitions.
Peter Moglia
On a brisk fall day in 1985, Peter Moglia entered UCLA’s campus as a nervous yet excited freshman, much like the rest of us. He was basking in his recent acceptance on appeal, prompting him to turn down two prestigious military academies, including West Point. However, Peter was soon to face some existential obstacles during his first quarter, as he initially came in prepared to follow a science path.
“My first quarter was a bit of a disaster,” he chuckled as he described his schedule consisting of Chem 11A, Math 31A, and Psych 10. He candidly shares his struggle with adjusting to the new college lifestyle, especially as UCLA did not leave much room to “wing it”. This is an experience that almost every freshman in college endures: the journey of growing independence, time management skills, and responsibility. It was comforting to hear this from someone as successful as Peter, as it is so easy to sink into the existential spiral of not being cut out for college life, or life out in the real world, for that matter. But he graciously reminds us that despite being placed on academic probation in his first year and struggling to sustain a healthy GPA, “there is a happy ending to all of this,”– and he was right.
Another year came around, and he decided to take Econ 1 as one of his “get-it-over-with” general education courses, but it turns out that it was much more than that. Peter performed well in that class, launching his transition into his new academic path of Economics.
“I remember I was learning about indifference curves and inelastic/elastic demand, and I started to see all of that in real life,” he said as he discussed his side job of working with computers. At the time, he did not think that a job selling computers would be as valuable as it was. But gradually, Peter began to strengthen these connections between his academia and his work, enhancing his understanding of both sides and developing his professional skills. His ability to continue making these types of connections eventually assisted in curating his well-rounded skill set that led him to his prolific career in real estate.
While reflecting on his professional journey, he emphasized the importance of real life experience alongside academic instruction. Even though it may not have initially been a prestigious occupation, the computer position he worked was just the experience and skillset he needed to land his first job in real estate, where he worked with converting real estate developers from mainframe-based accounting systems to personal-computer based systems. From there, he worked his way up the ladder to new positions, which included work like examining and underwriting loans before eventually going on to serve as the co-CEO and CIO for his current real estate company Alexandria. He was able to witness the growth of Alexandria, as he was one of the first fifteen people on the team. Over the course of 23 years, he saw this small, private startup transform into an incredibly profitable public company with a market cap of around $30.2 billion.
“I didn’t get to where I am because of what I learned through books, but from how I learned how to learn at UCLA,” Peter wisely noted. He emphasized the importance of going beyond typing away at a computer and going through the daily motions of getting tasks done, and instead learning how to prioritize one’s time, how to make connections, and simply, how to communicate effectively. “[Communicating well] is every bit as important as the knowledge you are getting in the classroom,” he said. He recommends getting a job that involves high levels of interaction with people, such as working at a restaurant. He even mentions how he reminds his own kids– who are current college students– to get out in the world and talk to people. In our technology and social media ridden society, this is a point that is humbling and essential for college students everywhere.
To drive this point home, Peter left us with the important reminder that “it is your grades and scores that get you in the door, but it is how you communicate that will get you the job”. Through his trials and tribulations at UCLA, he was surely able to prove that point.
UCLA Economics Professor Martha Bailey’s paper on paid family leave was featured in The Week. Her paper “The Long-Term Effects of California’s 2004 Paid Family Leave Act on Women’s Careers: Evidence from U.S. Tax Data” studies the short- and long-term effects of paid family leave on women’s carriers.
Former UCLA faculty member Guido Imbens won a 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences Monday… Read More
UCLA’s Natalie Bau was recently featured in ThePrint.in. ThePrint.in is a news, analysis, opinion and knowledge venture, launched in August 2017 by editor Shekhar Gupta. It is sharply focused on politics and policy, government and governance. Its leadership team includes India’s most experienced and respected journalists with proven track records in the finest news organizations.
The article, Covid and Containment Worsened Women’s Mental Health, Increased Food Insecurity in India, describes a large phone survey Professor Bau and her coauthors conducted in India during the pandemic. They find that the pandemic greatly increased food insecurity and decreased female mental health. Containment policies, though potentially critical to combat the pandemic, exacerbated these negative effects.
UCLA Economics Professor Martha Bailey’s work on the War on Poverty was featured in the Washington Post in relation to the current Biden infrastructure bill. Her co-edited book, Legacies of the War on Poverty, and her recent paper on the long-run returns to public investments, forthcoming in the American Economic Review, demonstrate how some federal expenditures can be regarded as investments.
A big congratulations to Adriana Lleras-Muney, who recently received an R21 grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to study the health impacts of long-run exposure to pollution using evidence from military personnel. The R21 grant mechanism is intended to encourage exploratory and developmental research by providing support for the early and conceptual stages of project development. A summary of her research can be found below.
Summary: A large body of observational studies link long-term pollution exposure to health harms, most notably mortality from cardiovascular disease and lung cancer. However these studies have some limitations. One factor that has not been studied much is the potential for confounding due to people’s ability to choose where they live. Indeed previous work finds that people with more information and greater resources are more likely to move to locations with lower pollution. This raises the question of whether poor health is caused by long-term exposure to pollution or by other factors correlated withpollution. In this project, we aim to address these issues of residential confounding by focusing on military personnel. Military personnel are an ideal group for this purpose because they are constrained in their ability to choose residential locations to avoid pollution—their moves are determined by the needs of the Army. Therefore, pollution exposures for this group are likely to be independent from the multitude of other factors that affect health. Moreover, military personnel have uniform access to health care, such that the outcomes we study are unlikely to reflect access to care or ability to pay, but instead reflect underlying demand for medical care due to disease. Additionally, rich administrative data enables us to track the location and health care usage of personnel over long periods of time.
The Department of Economics congratulates Simon Board, the Benjamin Graham Centennial Professor in Value Investing, on being named a Fellow of the Econometric Society The Econometric Society is one of the most prestigious learned society in the field of economics, with a world-wide membership. Its main object is to promote studies that aim at a unification of the theoretical and empirical approach to economic problems and that are penetrated by constructive and rigorous thinking similar to that which has come to dominate in the natural sciences. It operates as a purely scientific organization, without any political, social, financial or nationalistic allegiance or bias. The society is run by the Fellows who choose the constitution and elect the leadership. In turn, the leadership runs the journals of the society (Econometrica, Theoretical Economics, Quantitative Economics), and a series of conferences around the world. There are currently around 700 Fellows across the globe.
Professor Board is a microeconomic theorist who studies information economics, with applications to auction design, industrial organization, and labor economics. His recent research includes the spread of information on social networks, the design of dynamic pricing algorithms, and the role of reputation in incentivizing investment.
