The LIFE-M project, short for the Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Microdata Project, is pleased to announce the creation of a new research lab. In June 2021, the LIFE-M Lab appointed two undergraduate Research Fellows, Li Zhijian and Zach Wrubel, to conduct research on intergenerational mobility and health and the long-run effects of early childhood interventions and changes in public policies.
Professor Martha Bailey, the PI of the project, notes that LIFE-M combines U.S. vital records (birth, marriage, and death certificates) with census information using cutting-edge supervised machine learning techniques. With funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, the project has created millions of high-quality longitudinal and intergenerational links for four generations of Americans, beginning in the late 19th and covering most of the 20th century.
Research Fellows work under the day-to-day leadership of economics PhD students, Alex Coblin and Joaquin Serrano, and post-doctoral fellow, Peter Lin. “The best part of working with this lab has been getting to work alongside PhD students and postdocs everyday. Having daily meetings to get feedback on our code, discuss our findings, and present our research has helped me learn so much in such a short period of time,” says Zach. Li notes, “Working with historical data can yield unexpected gems – the history nerd in me was quite excited to learn about anachronistic professions like “bootblacks” and “charwomen” when we were working with occupational codes in the 1940 Census.”
Zach and Li highly recommend this opportunity to anyone looking to apply their economics knowledge and gain valuable research experience in a team setting. Whether your interests lie in economics, history, data science, public policy, or somewhere in between, the LIFE-M Fellows program has something for everyone. The team expects this experience to continue in the fall term. To read more about participating in the Fellows program, click here. Interested students should apply by AUGUST 31, 2021 here.
Congratulations to all the Undergraduate, Masters and PhD students who graduated this June from our Department. We are so proud of the hard work and dedication you showed during this unique time. While we were not able to have a traditional ceremony to celebrate all of your accomplishments, we are pleased to share with you the Undergraduate Program and Favorite UCLA Memories to highlight some of our amazing students.
The UCLA Department of Economics wants to congratulate Professor Andy Atkeson for recently being appointed co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Editors at the JPE are typically from the University of Chicago, so the appointment of Professor Atkeson is particularly unusual, and an acknowledgement of his standing in the profession and his editorial judgement.
One of the oldest and most prestigious journals in economics, the Journal of Political Economy presents significant and essential scholarship in economic theory and practice. The journal publishes highly selective and widely cited analytical, interpretive, and empirical studies in a number of areas, including monetary theory, fiscal policy, labor economics, development, microeconomic and macroeconomic theory, international trade and finance, industrial organization, and social economics.
UCLA’s Martha J. Bailey, along with Brenden D. Timpe & Shuqiao Sun, had their paper Prep School for Poor Kids: The Long-Run Impacts of Head Start on Human Capital and Economic Self-Sufficiency featured in the May 2021 issue of Anderson Review.
UCLA Anderson Review is a window into the cutting-edge research of expert faculty who are drawn to the school from around the globe. They examine crucial topics in business, the economy and the wider world of human existence. Each month, leading journalists report on UCLA Anderson faculty’s newly published research and most provocative working papers. The Review is produced with the support of UCLA Anderson’s Marketing & Communications team.
Congratulations to Pierre-Olivier Weill, the winner of the Warren C. Scoville Distinguished Teaching Award for best undergraduate teaching in Winter 2021! Pierre-Olivier Weill won this award while teaching ECON 106V: Investments. This course introduces the principles of investment and portfolio theory. Topics include optimal portfolio construction, fixed income analysis, option pricing theory, and active portfolio management.
Warren C. Scoville was a faculty member for the UCLA Department of Economics for 28 years before his death in 1969. This award is given quarterly in his name to the ladder faculty member who receives the highest teaching evaluation scores from his or her course.
Mussa (1986) documented a sharp simultaneous increase in the volatility of both nominal and real exchange rates after the end of the Bretton Woods System of pegged exchange rates in early 1970s. This is commonly viewed as a central piece of evidence in favor of monetary policy having an effect on the real economy. In this paper, Oleg Itskhoki (UCLA) and Dmitry Mukhin (Wisconsin) show that there was no simultaneous change in the properties of the other macroeconomic variables — neither nominal like inflation, nor real like consumption, output or net exports. They argue that rather than discriminating between models with sticky versus flexible prices, or monetary versus productivity shocks, the Mussa puzzle provides sharp evidence in favor of models with monetary non-neutrality arising due to financial market segmentation.
The Midwest Finance Association is a professional association of academics and finance industry professionals dedicated to developing and disseminating information concerning recent advances in financial theory and practice to members and other interested individuals.
Troy Aikman isn’t the only Bruin who has helped Fox Sports become one of the leaders in sports entertainment. Behind the scenes, another UCLA graduate works tirelessly on the sports fans know and love. Claudia Martinez hails from the San Fernando Valley in California where she was raised in a household with a father who loves sports and passed on this emotion on to his daughters. Over the innumerable “NFL Sundays,” she saw how sports united her family and community. Over time, she herself acquired a taste for the thrill of the unexpected element in games as she saw underdog teams progress in tournaments like NCAA March Madness. Growing up, alongside the sacred status that sports held, her family instilled the importance of academics and working hard from an early age.
Claudia’s academic excellence and hard-work paid off when she was accepted to UCLA in 1997. She chose to pursue her education in Westwood so that she could remain close to home while looking to grow among the rich diversity of UCLA’s student body. Immediately, she encountered the all-too-familiar overwhelming reality which dawns upon every ambitious Bruin, of having to carve out a unique college path. As a young freshman who found herself with a never-ending list of exciting courses and a sea of clubs, extracurricular activities, and internship opportunities to traverse, Claudia nostalgically recalls the time – “I wanted to do it all!” Ultimately, she chose to pursue an Economics major as it aligned closely with her interest in finance and her dreams of being a Chief Financial Officer one day.
However, her journey was not as simple. At UCLA, she initially struggled to develop a strong rapport with her professors given large class sizes. Nevertheless, her grit and practicality meant finding solutions – she made it a point to attend office hours to introduce herself to professors and formed study groups to meet other students that shared common interests. Wiser over time, Claudia explains, “it’s what you make of it and how you deal with your experiences.” She carried this fighting spirit with her after graduation as well. Initially, she spent a summer in Europe, and upon returning to the states it was a particularly challenging time to find work due to the 2001 economic recession, she took up an accounting job at the Bruin-card office at the Ackerman Center during which she even received a promotion for her hard work.
Simultaneously, Claudia tapped into the UCLA Alumni network to discuss opportunities with and learn from the experiences of other Bruins who transitioned into the finance and entertainment industries. She moved on to other roles in her career at movie studios and a PR firm before joining FOX Sports as a Manager of Communications and Media Relations for the Spanish language network, FOX Deportes. At FOX Sports, her ambition, grit and hard work led her to being promoted several times and currently serving as a VP of Communications where she is pursuing a role that lies at the intersection of her professional skills and childhood passion. In her current role, Claudia manages the publicity and media relations campaigns for the network’s premier properties – the National Football League and FIFA World Cups. In her seven years at FOX Sports, she has many cherished memories overseas while managing some of the largest events for the company, spending 42 days on-site in Russia during the 2018 FIFA World Cup and leading PR efforts in France for the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup. At home, the strategic PR campaign that Claudia and team executed for Super Bowl LIV generated the most press coverage ever for the event for the network.
Claudia reflects fondly on her time at UCLA, recollecting her love for attending athletic events and tailgating at games where she could watch the Bruins’ world-class sports teams compete for conference and national titles, though she might still be curiously waiting for some football success.
Claudia’s work enables her to be authentic and carry over her childhood passion for sports day-in-day-out at FOX Sports and, in doing so, she is an inspiration to us young Bruins who may find ourselves running helter-skelter in pursuit of a tangible career path. Claudia reminds us that she too has been in our shoes and advises that young Bruins not to overwhelm ourselves with having a “perfect plan,” but instead to be flexible, live with intention and enjoy the journey while maximizing everything that life throws our way.
Written by Pakzad Daruwala
Author’s note: The interview with Claudia was conducted in the week our Bruins were to take on Alabama Crimson Tide. An intense discussion occurred on the odds our Bruins winning. Claudia’s “heart” undisputedly backed the Bruins whereas “reason” told her otherwise. We all know how that game turned out – once again proof to always follow the heart!
In the U.S. today, there exist large racial disparity in economic outcomes. In wealth, the median white household had more than ten times the wealth of the median African American household. Addressing the racial gap in economic outcomes is a particularly pressing issue as studies have shown that these gaps are persistent. Compared to white children, African American children face substantially lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility.
In her UCLA PhD dissertation, Xuanyu (Iris) Fu investigates the historical reasons behind this racial gap. Specifically, she looks closely at an important historical event, the failure of the Freedman’s Bank. The Freedman’s Bank was private bank established by Congress at the end of the Civil War for African Americans. During its years of operation, approximately 1 in 8 African American families who lived in the vicinity of the bank held an account. While the bank was established with good intentions, it was forced to close in 1874 due to the rampant abuse of banking reserves by the upper management. What began as a well-meaning attempt to encourage savings led to significant wealth loss for the families who entrusted their savings to the bank.
In the first chapter of her dissertation, “Intergenerational Effects of Wealth Loss: Evidence from the Freedman’s Bank”, she studies whether a negative parental wealth shock, stemming from the failure of the Freedman’s Bank, had an effect on children’s educational outcomes. To do so, she assembled individual-level records from the Freedman’s Bank, and linked them to the full-count historical Censuses to observe children’s outcomes decades after the bank failure. By comparing households with similar level of wealth prior to the bank failure, the results show that children from families who lost a higher proportion of their wealth were less likely to attend school after the failure.
During the course of the investigation, she also finds something surprising: the bank was very successful at promoting schooling and literacy amongst the depositors’ children prior to its failure. In particular, her results show that bank was able to education for the depositors’ children through its connection with the American Missionary Association (AMA), a Christian educational organization. Many AMA teachers concurrently served as bank cashiers, hence they were able to inform depositors of schooling opportunities for their children and encouraged them to invest more in their children’s human capital. The human capital gains from the time while the bank was in operation was large enough for older children to outweigh and outlast the adverse effect of wealth loss from its failure.
On Tuesday, the Department of Economics installed Professor Simon Board as the inaugural holder of the Benjamin Graham Centennial Chair in Value Investing. This new Chair helps strengthen our Value Investing Program, which teaches students how to value stocks, with a commitment to objectivity, rationality and a heavy dose of humility. In his talk, Professor Board discussed his research on “Competitive Advantage in the Information Age”. He was joined by Professor Darnell Hunt (Dean of Social Sciences), Dora Costa (Chair of Economics) and Professor Bill Simon (Co-Founder of the Value Investing Program).
Mila Skulkina, CFA is a Portfolio Manager at Lord Abbett, focusing on Emerging Market Fixed Income strategies. Ms. Skulkina leads the firm’s ESG Sovereign analysis and integration for Emerging Markets. She is a frequent speaker on these and other topics at various conferences. Prior to joining Lord Abbett in 2013, Ms. Skulkina was a multi-asset Research Analyst at Sanders Capital working across long-only, long/short, and multi-asset portfolios. Previously, she was a Strategy Consultant at Bain & Company and an Investment Banking Analyst at Merrill Lynch. She has 18 years of investment experience and holds an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She received her undergraduate degree in business economics from UCLA, graduating summa cum laude. Additionally, Ms. Skulkina is a holder of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.
