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.
Michael C. Iracondo, BA ’91
Managing Director – Global Treasury, The Clorox Company
Michael provides leadership for Clorox’s cash and banking activities worldwide, managing bank
relationships, developing and executing capital structure decisions involving investment, borrowing and
debt issuance activities, and supporting the Company’s dividend policy and share repurchase activities.
His responsibilities also include leading the Company’s efforts to manage financial risk associated with
foreign exchange, interest rate, and commodity price volatility, and providing direction and oversight of
the Company’s defined benefit and contribution plan investments. Over the course of 20 years with
Clorox, Michael has played a significant role in numerous strategic initiatives, providing leadership to
transformational operating model and technology projects, business development activities including
acquisitions and divestitures, and in helping the Company achieve climate stewardship goals.
Based at their headquarters in Oakland, CA, Michael joined Clorox in 2001, holding roles in accounting
and investor relations before moving into treasury in 2005. Michael began his professional career with
Ernst & Young, serving for over 6 years in their San Francisco and London offices before joining the
treasury department of Transamerica Corporation in San Francisco.
Michael received his B.A. in economics/business from UCLA, and is a Certified Treasury Professional and Certified Public Accountant.
Below is a reminiscence for Professor Bill Allen, who passed away on January 15, 2021, from former student Suheil Kawar (UCLA Econ Ph.D. – 1974).
Dear Dr. Costa,
May I start by telling you how much I appreciate your efforts at maintaining contact with graduates of the UCLA Economics Program and enjoy reading about faculty and student endeavors and achievements.
Pease forgive my intrusion on your time. I have taken the liberty of contacting you to express an appreciation of Bill Allen whose death on January 15, 2021 just came to my attention through your latest letter. In this connection, it may be a worthwhile endeavor to invite former students to reminisce about faculty they have known and thereby establish a written record to supplement the longstanding oral tradition.
Bill Allen (throughout my daily presence at UCLA from 1964 through 1968, I never heard anybody refer to him except as “Bill”) was a wonderful teacher and conveyer of the basic economic concepts and ideas. He may not enjoy the reputation among academic economists that his high-powered UCLA contemporaries Armen Alchian, Karl Brunner, Jack Hirshleifer, Axel Leijonhufvud, and Earl Thompson enjoyed through their well-regarded books or articles in the top professional journals, but he was a very effective disseminator of the basic ideas and issues of price theory. Through his talks on “The Midnight Economist” he reached a much wider audience to which he succinctly explained various issues arising out of the scarcity, cost-benefit calculus, choice, and allocation issues that are at the center of microeconomic analysis. In this respect, he may have had a much greater impact on the dissemination of ideas, and their acceptance, and on formulation of public policy than was possible through addressing the more exclusive audience that academic economists try to reach in their writings.
Allow me to share a few reminiscences from my encounters with Bill Allen.
I first ran into him just after my arrival to the graduate program in September 1964 when he was assigned as my advisor for selecting courses to register for. He looked at my selection of graduate classes which included Economic Theory (then Econ 201A) with Dr. Alchian. His reaction was that three of the four selections were fine but that taking Theory with Alchian during my first semester was a bad idea! He suggested taking the class with Dr. Intriligator who had just joined the department from MIT and was sure to assign a long and comprehensive reading list that all new graduate students should labor through. He said that Alchian would expect his students to start addressing implications of resource allocation questions regardless of whether they had the tools or even knew the literature! And he was right. I audited Alchian’s class in my first semester (we were on the semester system back then) and realized what a challenge it would have been to make sense of the class and the instructor’s seriousness.
Bill Allen was known for his wry sense of humor and ability to couch statements in low-key terms that did not intimidate the listener. As such he could convey a harsh evaluation in a much easier to take manner compared with how Alchian and Karl Brunner would convey the same information. This made him much more successful at toning down both good and bad news and avoided the listener’s elation or deflation.
There used to be a faculty-graduate student get together on Friday afternoons 3-5 pm wherein faculty would provide coffee and doughnuts and topical economic issues would be raised. It was held in that gloomy windowless common room in the middle of the 8th floor of Bunche Hall. One day Bill Allen came into the room beaming saying that he had talked to Professor McKean at the University of Virginia (Dr. McKean was an eminent specialist in public finance who had moved from UCLA to UVa in 1965) who told him that supermarkets in Charlottesville, Va. sold only grade A California oranges! Many in the room looked quizzically at one another waiting for Bill Allen to elaborate. He beamed and explained that Mckean’s observation was a confirmation of the Law of Demand: with equal transport costs, superior quality oranges would be relatively less expensive than lower quality oranges and thus relatively more of them would be consumed! Bill Allen always delighted in pursuing such basic implications of price theory
Throughout my stay at UCLA, Bill Allen had the office at the very end of a long corridor on the 8th floor of Bunche Hall (room 8296 if memory serves me correctly) which required a long walk to reach him. He would give directions to his office as being after Dr. Herrick’s office and just before the room allocated for women students trying to take a rest!
Sometime in the late 1980s, Bill Allen came to the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. to give a talk about payment imbalances. I was working there at the time and went to hear his remarks. After he finished and we were making some small talk, he beamed at me and said that he was happy that the UCLA brand of economics was finding newer places to work in than the usual college affiliates. I told him that I had listened to The Midnight Economist by accident during a passage through Los Angeles and he was kind enough to send me seven compilations of his talks which I keep at hand and refer to frequently. Good analysis never goes stale.
On April 7, 2021, the Adam Smith Society held a lively debate on the merits and drawbacks of raising the minimum wage with UCLA professor Lee Ohanian and MIT professor Daron Acemoglu, moderated by the Wall Street Journal’s Eric Morath. (Hosted by CMU Tepper and Pitt Katz chapters.)
The Adam Smith Society works to provide a venue where this discussion of foundational ideas can be explored and applied to the current economic environment. We believe that MBA students and business professionals should acquire more than just expertise in areas such as management, marketing, and quantitative analysis—as important as these skills are. They should also come to understand—and be able to defend—the nature of the economic system that fosters job creation, wealth generation, the alleviation of poverty globally, and scientific innovation.
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 April 2021 issue of The NBER Digest. The paper evaluates the long-run effects of Head Start using large-scale, restricted 2000-2018 Census-ACS data linked to the SSA’s Numident file, which contains exact date and county of birth. Using the county rollout of Head Start between 1965 and 1980 and age-eligibility cutoffs for school entry, we find that Head Start generated large increases in adult human capital and economic self-sufficiency, including a 0.65-year increase in schooling, a 2.7-percent increase in high-school completion, an 8.5-percent increase in college enrollment, and a 39-percent increase in college completion. These estimates imply sizable, long-term returns to public investments in large-scale preschool programs.
The NBER Digest is a free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is a private, nonpartisan organization that facilitates cutting-edge investigation and analysis of major economic issues. It disseminates research findings to academics, public and private-sector decision-makers, and the public by posting more than 1,200 working papers and convening more than 120 scholarly conferences, each year.
