Allyson Benas

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Allyson Benas

Allyson Benas, currently Head of Product at Holotech Studios, had many worlds to navigate before she levelled up to her current position. As Benas recounts, she started her first year as an undergraduate at UCLA open to the numerous opportunities it had to offer. Originally an International Development Studies Major, her passion for community development programs found its place in the numerous organizations on campus, and took her to an internship in Honduras that piqued her interest in the nuances of business. She started taking economics classes and eventually decided to major in Business Economics with a minor in Accounting, and was even in the inaugural year of the Sharpe Fellows program.

After her graduation in 2009, Benas was specifically interested in real estate banking, motivated by her semester abroad at the Universidad de Costa Rica. Her first position out of college was at PricewaterhouseCoopers, after successfully overcoming the challenging job search process. A “Big 4” firm was a good place to start for the experience of working in a large organization with lots of cycles of development and growth, and due to the strong emphasis on foundational knowledge.

However, her quest lay elsewhere. When one of her mentors moved to London to work for King Digital Entertainment, the makers of Candy Crush, she went along to discover a new world of video games. Playing to her strengths, she was on the finance team at King and managed revenue recognition for 9 studios around the world. Benas also acquired a keen eye for design that was integral to her future positions.

Benas put this design skill and her business acumen to the test with her entrepreneurial stint as the founder of Fantasy Suites. She built a game designed around fantasy leagues for the competitive reality television shows like The Bachelor, inspired by a simplified version she played with her friends. This challenge required savvy game design perspective as it had to compete against ABC Network’s own game, and because it had to be designed around the fantasy leagues atrophying as contestants were eliminated off the show. As she recalls from her time in an industry dominated by male focused video games, she had to work hard to pitch her game ideas to male investors with their own misguided intuitions about female focused video games. She emphasizes the need for women to be comfortable owning their greater experience and knowledge of their demographic, as the growing market of female gamers cannot be ignored. Furthermore, she encourages aspiring video game designers to reach out to similarly underserved markets. For example, Benas is confident that the next market breakthrough will be apps for baby boomers moving into technology.

Benas is a big advocate of learning by doing, and reiterates the role her time at UCLA played in teaching her this skill. For her, being at a competitive school like UCLA underlined that she was accountable for her own outcomes, and motivated her to seek out the numerous resources that the campus had to offer. Her most important piece of advice is definitely food for thought: “don’t overthink the future, it will limit the risks you will take”.

 

Written by Yashwini Sodhani

Digitization in the Film Industry

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El Hadi Caoui

Technology standards play a central role in a broad array of industries: for example, AC in electric power distribution, FedACH for wire transfers in banking, USB for data transmission, MP3 for music distribution, and 4G LTE for mobile devices. What do these industries have in common? Network effects: the value of a given technology increases with the number of users. For instance, a bank’s incentive to adopt a particular electronic payment technology (say FedACH) increases with the number of other banks that already use the technology, because it can exchange payments with more institutions. Industries with network effects benefit from coordinating on a single technology (the ”standard”) to exploit network benefits.

However, in the medium to long-run, adopting a standard may have costs. Once bound together by the benefits of the standard, the industry may become reluctant to switch to better technologies as they become available. Can coordination on a standard prevent an industry from efficiently adopting new and better technologies? If so, what are the sources of this “excess inertia” in adoption? What instruments can a regulator use to break the stalemate and encourage the efficient adoption of new technologies? While the theoretical literature has long shown that excess inertia can arise, these questions have received little attention in the empirical literature.

In his job market paper, “Estimating the Costs of Standardization: Evidence from the Movie Industry,” UCLA PhD student, El Hadi Caoui, studies the movie industry’s switch from the 35mm film standard to digital cinema between 2005 and 2014. Digital cinema consists of distributing motion pictures to theaters over digital support (internet or hard drives) as opposed to the historical use of 35mm film reels. To screen digital movies, theaters must equip their screens with digital projectors instead of film projectors. Theaters and distributors achieve large cost-reductions with digital technology, but due to network effects under 35mm film, the conversion to digital may have been too slow.

To evaluate this claim, Hadi combines a dynamic model of the industry’s conversion to digital with detailed data on movie theaters’ adoption of digital projectors in France. Using the dynamic model, the paper simulates counterfactual scenarios and shows that industry profits over 2005-2014 are 18% lower due to “excess inertia.” Additionally, 62% of this loss is explained by coordination failure: if a firm is uncertain about other firms’ willingness to switch, it is unwilling to risk switching without being followed, which creates delays in the adoption of digital. Adoption externalities explain the rest of this loss (38%): a theater’s conversion to digital raises the availability of digital movies and benefits theaters that already use digital. This benefit to other adopters is, however, not accounted for by the theater making its decision.

The results suggest that policy intervention in network industries can be beneficial, in particular, to coordinate firms’ adoption of new technologies. Moreover, the most effective instrument—between adoption subsidies or standard-setting committees— depends on the relative importance of adoption externalities and coordination failure, which is likely industry-specific.

El Hadi Caoui is graduating from UCLA this summer, and will be joining the University of Toronto’s Rotman Business School as an Assistant Professor.

Lloyd Greif delivers 2019 Undergraduate Commencement Speech

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Keynote Speaker – Lloyd Greif ’77, President & CEO, Greif & Co.

 

On June 15, 2019, the UCLA Department of Economics held its Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony at Pauley Pavilion.  Keynote Speaker Lloyd Greif (Class of ’77), President & CEO of Greif & Co., a leading investment bank, congratulated nearly 800 graduates on their singular achievement and wished them success in their future endeavors.  During his speech, suitably entitled “Teaching Young Dogs New Tricks,” Greif spoke of his experience at UCLA, the time he spent working while pursuing his MBA and J.D. degrees, and the key life lessons he has learned since graduating.  He stressed the importance of having influential mentors and encouraged students to set about building their own personal networks to help them reach their career goals. To watch the video of his speech, please click on the link below:

Watch 2019 Commencement Video Here

 

Ronald D. Mass

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Board of Visitors

 

Ronald D. Mass
Managing Partner
Almitas Capital LLC

Ronald Mass, is the founder of Almitas Capital. He was a senior portfolio manager for over 20 years at Western Asset Management, an institutional fixed income manager with over $450 billion in assets under management, and led the Asset Backed Securities (ABS) and Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) portfolio management teams. Mr. Mass chaired the Leveraged Products Committee, was a senior member of the Broad Market Strategy and Risk Management Committees, and was responsible for management of over $100 billion in assets. He initiated the launch and management of the Western Asset Mortgage Capital (WMC) Reit, numerous closed and open end mutual funds, CDO and CLO products, and customized client portfolios. Additional responsibilities included management of Convertible Bonds, Preferred Stock, Aircraft Equipment Financing, and Secured Corporate Bonds. Prior to joining Western Asset, Mr. Mass was a Research Associate at Credit Suisse First Boston. He graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Los Angeles with a Bachelors in Economics and Business. Mr. Mass is a CFA Charterholder and a member of the CFA Institute. He currently serves as a board member of Woodside Homes, a leading West Coast homebuilder, is a guest lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and CFA Society of Los Angeles, and is a frequent speaker at industry events.

Melisa Wilson

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Board of Visitors

 

Melisa L. Wilson
Managing Director
Leasing & Asset Finance

Melisa Wilson is a Managing Director of the Leasing & Asset Finance Group (L&AF) of MUFG Union Bank, N.A.  The group provides financing to the Fortune 1000 companies, the renewable power industry, U.S. subsidiaries of Asian companies, and MUFG’s client base.

L&AF’s products span structured financings, leveraged leases, single investor leases, synthetic leases, term loans, construction loans, and partnership investments, among other things. A key member of L&AF team for over twenty years, Ms. Wilson since July 2014 has been the Head of Planning, Operations and Administration (previously Chief Operating Officer) for the group. Before her elevation to this position, Ms. Wilson’s structured financing responsibilities included client management, transaction negotiations and execution, legal contract review, and credit process management for the renewables industry.  In her current role, Ms. Wilson directs and oversees the day-to-day business operations of the group, subsidiary management, operations and accounting, planning, hiring, shared administrative services, and other organization functions.

Previously, Ms. Wilson spent five years as a member of the Project Finance Department in Energy Capital Services within Union Bank where she provided project and corporate financing for power plants. While at Energy Capital Services, Ms. Wilson was promoted to senior vice president. Prior to that, Ms. Wilson served as a lender in the Utilities Department.

Ms. Wilson joined Union Bank, N.A. in 1990 as an assistant vice president in the Marketing Support Department where she performed both marketing and financial analysis.

Ms. Wilson holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and business from UCLA, and an M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. She also completed the Kellogg Graduate School of Management Executive Program at Northwestern University.

Martin Hackmann and Michela Giorcelli—Named 2019-2020 Hellman Fellows

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Congratulations to Assistant Professors Martin Hackmann and Michela Giorcelli who were both named Hellman Fellows for the 2019-2020 Academic year! The UCLA Hellman Fellows Program supports “research and creative activities that promote career advancement and enhance the individual’s progress towards tenure.” Read below to learn more about their research proposals.

 

“The Effects of the Managerial Practices on Firm Innovation”

Michela Giorcelli

 

While a growing literature has documented a positive effects of managerial practices on firm performance, less is known about their impact on firm innovation. The aim of this research is to study the effects of cross-firm transfer of managerial practices on firms’ propensity to innovate.  Using evidence from a unique historical episode, the United States Technical Assistance and Productivity Program in Italy, we will study whether business training programs changed managers’ attitude towards innovation, measured by the number of patents and investment in R&D in receiving firms.

 

 

“Patient and Provider Incentives in Long Term Care”

Martin Hackmann

Long-term care (LTC) expenditures are high and rising. Since more than 50% of LTC expenditures are covered by Medicaid, developing and expanding cost-effective home and community alternatives to expensive nursing home care is of high policy priority for many state Medicaid programs. This research seeks to understand how financial patient and provider incentives affect the mode and cost of LTC as well as their health consequences. Building on this evidence, this research project intends to evaluate different policy proposals that aim to expand home based care models using patient and provider incentives.

Stanley Fischer to speak at MAE Distinguished Speaker Series

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On Thursday, May 23, 2019 from 6:00-7:30 PM, UCLA’s Department of Economics MAE Distinguished Speaker Series will be hosting Former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Stanley Fisher speaking on the topic of “Monetary Policy Challenges Eleven Years After the Great Recession.”

Stanley Fischer is the former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and served as Governor of the Bank of Israel, First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and chief economist at the World Bank. While Professor of Economics at MIT, Dr. Fischer served as thesis advisor to Ben Bernanke, Chair of the Federal Reserve, and Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank.

Please click on this link if you would like to RSVP for the event.

Pablo Fajgelbaum’s research featured in national news

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UCLA Department Economics Associate Professor Pablo Fajgelbaum is featured in a variety of national news stories of late.  Along with co-authors Pinelopi Goldberg (Yale (leave) and World Bank), Patrick Kennedy (UC Berkeley), and Amit Khandelwal (Columbia), their paper “The Return to Protectionism” has been cited by The Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, The Washington Post,  TIME, and Slate, among other outlets. The paper analyzes the aggregate and regional impacts of the 2018 trade war on the U.S. economy.  Update: 05/16/2019: the paper has also been cited by The Washington Post, The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, CBS News, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, Fortune, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, and Financial Times.

 

 

 

 

The NBER Digest highlights research by Pablo Fajgelbaum

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The May 2019 Edition of the National Bureau of Economic Research The NBER Digest highlights a paper by Pablo Fajgelbaum.  Along with co-authors Pinelopi Goldberg (Yale (leave) and World Bank), Patrick Kennedy (UC Berkeley), and Amit Khandelwal (Columbia), their paper “The Return to Protectionism” has been cited for its analysis of the welfare effects of tariffs during the recent trade war, and of the impact across U.S. regions with different voting patterns in the last presidential election