Andre James

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Board of Visitors

 

 

Mr. Andre James
Senior Partner
Bain & Company

Andre James is a Senior Partner in Bain & Company’s Los Angeles office.  He has advised media & entertainment clients across the globe for the past 16 years and currently heads Bain’s Media & Entertainment Practice in the Americas.

Mr. James has worked with clients most sectors of the media & entertainment ecosystem including TV, film, music, video games, print, digital advertising and out of home advertising.  In these sectors, he has experience in most steps of the value chain from content creation to aggregation to distribution.  The issues he has advised on range from strategy to operations to organization to M&A/PMI.  Mr. James has authored Bain’s point of view on the future of video and is a frequent speaker at conferences on this topic as well as others.

Mr. James jointed Bain & Company in 2000.  In addition to working in the Los Angeles office, Andre has spent significant time as a member of Bain’s Hong Kong, Seoul and Paris offices.

Prior to joining Bain & Company, Mr. James worked for Coopers & Lybrand as an analyst in their middle market mergers and acquisitions practice.  He has also gained experience from working in the legal and private equity industries.

Mr. James earned an MBA from the Wharton School and a JD from University of Pennsylvania’s School of Law.  He is a licensed attorney in the state of California.  Andre is an alumnus of UCLA where he received a Bachelor of Arts in business economics, graduating magna cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Vedika Sanghai

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John J. Peterson Scholarship Scholarship Recipient

Biography: Vedika Sanghai is a third year double majoring in Business Economics and Psychology with a minor in Entrepreneurship. She was born and brought up in Mumbai, India and moved to Los Angeles 3 years ago to pursue her education. She is interested in various fields such as Consulting, Marketing and Social work. Vedika aims to work in a company for a few years after graduation, after which she aspires to move back to India and build her own social enterprise business, which would focus on alleviating poverty in rural parts of India through the channel of education. She has absolutely loved her experience at UCLA and believes that it has helped her grow as an individual. She hopes to make the best of the opportunities she was given at UCLA and help others achieve their dreams.

Future Plans: This summer, Vedika is hoping to do a strategy/ marketing internship within the entertainment industry. She hopes to apply the synergy of her Economics and Psychology major to accurately understand consumer needs and communicate with them effectively. She also aims to work on her own startup, alongside with an internship. After gaining adequate experience, Vedika strives to secure a job with a consulting company in the fall, where she aspires to work for the next 3-4 years. After working with a consulting company, Vedika will pursue her MBA and move back to India after, trying to build and grow her own social enterprise company

What does the scholarship mean to me?: I am honored and overwhelmed to receive the John J. Peterson scholarship. Having seen my whole company start their own businesses and companies, I have always known that I would want to be an entrepreneur. Through the various Economics and Entrepreneurship classes I have taken at UCLA, I have been equipped with the knowledge to successfully start and run my own business. I will be using the proceeds of this scholarship towards my education as well as applying it towards my startup to get access to the initial resources I needed but did not have access to. This scholarship will help me get a head start with my company and give me the opportunity to become a successful entrepreneur by allowing me to apply what I have learned in the classroom to the real world. I am going to spend my upcoming summer working on my startup and hope to launch it in the Fall of 2017.

Devaluation Risk and the Real Economy

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Colin Weiss

A pertinent form of economic uncertainty for developing countries today is that of devaluation risk: the possibility of a large decrease in the value of a country’s currency relative to other currencies. It is difficult to measure the impact of economic and political uncertainty on the economy because changes in uncertainty are often the result of changes in economic performance. The effects of devaluation risk in particular are also hard to estimate because actual devaluations often quickly follow increases in devaluation risk.

In his job market paper, “Is Devaluation Risk Contractionary? Evidence from U.S. Silver Coinage Agitation, 1878-1900,” UCLA graduate student Colin Weiss uses an historical setting to identify the negative effect of devaluation risk on aggregate economic activity. In the late 19th century, the U.S. operated on a gold standard, where the dollar could be exchanged for gold at a fixed price at the treasury. This system was unpopular with a large fraction of the population who wanted the dollar to be devalued against gold under a policy of unlimited silver coinage. While the U.S. did not abandon the gold standard, political factors increased devaluation risk for several years.

 

Weiss constructed a set of daily-level silver policy events between 1878 and 1900 from the historical record. He then gathered daily data on bond yields for U.S. corporations during this time period. News indicating a higher probability of dollar devaluation raised corporate borrowing costs, particularly for fi rms with heavy debt burdens that were payable in gold. Using monthly data on the interest rate differential between short-term gold and dollar-denominated debt, he shows that silver policy news is quickly followed by jumps in this devaluation risk premium.
Turning to the aggregate effects of devaluation risk, Weiss links his daily silver policy news series with a monthly industrial production index and traces the response of this index to silver news. An increase in devaluation risk is associated with a signifi cant fall in industrial production one year after the silver policy news occurs according to his analysis. He argues that devaluation risk lowered economic activity during this time period because greater uncertainty about the dollar led to a contraction in credit as gold was withdrawn from the fi nancial sector. Evidence on gold out flows from the U.S. and the ratio of currency holdings to deposits in banks during this time period corroborates this hypothesis.

Many developing countries today borrow heavily in dollars rather than their local currency, a trend that has accelerated in recent years. At the same time, the probabilities that these other currencies depreciate against the dollar has increased as the Federal Reserve solidifi es plans to raise interest rates and consequently the value of the dollar in the near future. Weiss’s research indicates that developing countries’ financial conditions deserve careful monitoring in light of these facts.

Colin Weiss will be joining the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in August.

Barry Eggers

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Barry Eggers (’85) is a founding partner at Lightspeed Ventures, a venture capitalist firm which focuses largely on IT and Technology start-ups (If that name rings a bell, it is because a few years ago they seed funded a little known company called Snapchat). What most don’t know is that his journey, which led him to Silicon Valley, started in Westwood.

Barry Eggers

At UCLA, Eggers majored in Economics Business and loved the subject. An athlete at heart, Eggers was a part of the NCAA Men’s Water Polo team, fondly recalling their experiences competing against other PAC 10 schools. Aside from this, he was a passionate UCLA football fan and a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, where he cultivated his social circles. As such, he often found himself working with small, dedicated teams since his college days.

After graduating from Stanford Business School, he joined Cisco. Cisco, at the time, had recently gone public and was still in its infancy. He watched as Cisco grew from 400 to 12,000 employees, and loved working in different roles as the company grew; it felt like he had a new job every year. However, as Cisco grew larger, Eggers missed the intimacy and excitement of working in a smaller and dynamic environment. The venture capital world was, quite literally, calling.

After leaving Cisco, he founded Lightspeed Ventures and began working with small start-ups. He loved the feeling of discovering a company and watching the journey it made. These were risky ventures and no one knew where a company would go. However, this was really exciting for him, because he never knew where the next great journey would come from.

Rather conveniently, he discovered Snapchat in his home when he saw his daughter using the app with her friends. This sparked Barry’s interest, and he talked to his partner Jeremy Liew. After Jeremy tracked down Evan Spiegel, Lightspeed became Snap’s first investor. Since then,  Barry has watched Evan Spiegel grow from an aspiring 21-year old entrepreneur at Stanford to the CEO of an emerging social media powerhouse.

Eggers recalled that something like this was virtually impossible when he was still in school: the word “entrepreneurship” did not exist. He describes how back in his time, you would graduate college, get a job, and climb the corporate ladder. Now, the opportunities are limitless, and he is actively trying to bring these opportunities to UCLA students. Lightspeed Ventures sponsors StartUp UCLA. Eggers himself endowed an annual seed fund prize for UCLA teams, and is a driving force of the entrepreneurship minor.

He believes that college is a great place to learn interpersonal skills, that in order to succeed in Silicon Valley you must get familiar with the ecosystem. The VCs, angel investors, consumers and directors present in Silicon Valley act as catalysts for success to anyone who can adapt to the system. UCLA, much like Silicon Valley, is an ecosystem ripe with opportunities. Anyone who takes advantage of these opportunities will walk out with a set of interpersonal skills and experiences that will help him or her succeed anywhere in the world.

His parting advice would be that you never know where life will take you and where you will end up. He never thought he would be working as a VC. However, if you work at a growing company that you are passionate about, you are sure to move forward and end up somewhere you like. You never know, but one fine day, you could discover the next Snapchat.

Written by Harsh Gupta

Click here to see more Alumni Interviews.

Adriana Lleras-Muney in Vox and The New York Times

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Adriana Lleras-Muney’s co-authored article on mothers’ pensions has been cited in two national news outlets this month, The New York Times and Vox.  The New York Times article cites Lleras-Muney’s study in an article about supply side economics, while Vox draws upon her research in connection to child poverty in the U.S..  Professor Lleras-Muney’s paper shows how paying cash to poor families where the breadwinner died led those children to earn significantly higher incomes.

Jay Lu wins Winter 2017 Scoville Teaching Award

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We would like to congratulate Jay Lu for winning the Scoville Award for best undergraduate teaching in Winter 2017 for his class Econ 148 on Behavioral Economics.

Jay Lu

Behavioral economics is a subfield of economics that incorporates insights from psychology and other social sciences. The broad goal is to improve the realism of economic models by incorporating features such as aversion for losses, problems with self-control, or concern for others. The class reviews some of the standard assumptions made in economics, examines evidence on how human behavior systematically departs from these assumptions and explores alternative models of human decision-making in order to help improve economic analyses. This is Jay Lu’s second time winning this award.  Congratulations!

2017 West Coast Experiments Conference

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Rosa Matzkin

Rosa Matzkin

The tenth annual West Coast Experiments Conference was co-organized by Professor Rodrigo Pinto.

The Conference was held at UCLA on April 24-25, 2017, preceded by in-depth methods training workshops on Sunday, April 23.  The West Coast Experiments Conference is an annual conference that brings together leading scholars and graduate students in economics, political science, and other social sciences who share an interest in causal identification broadly speaking.  Now in its tenth year, the WCE is a venue for methodological instruction and debate over design-based and observational methods for causal inference, both theory and applications.

UCLA Professor Roza Matzkin presented a paper on identification in simulation equation models. The conference was attended by a PhD students and experts, including Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton and Turing Awards winner Judea Pearl.

 

 

Marek Pycia featured in Reuters

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Today, Marek Pycia‘s paper on UCLA’s voucher system was featured in Reuters. Traditionally, kidney donors directly donate kidneys to their relatives. However, what if the kidney donor is elderly, and the relative does not need the kidney immediately (e.g. they have early stage kidney disease)? Professor Pycia’s paper discusses UCLA’s new voucher system which enables donors to “pay it forward”, donating today in return for a promise that their relative will be at the front of the queue when they need a kidney. The paper is with Jeffrey Veale, a member of UCLA’s Medical School, and other coauthors. It is published in Transplantation and has become the basis for a national system of kidney transplant vouchers used by over twenty transplant centers.

John Asker awarded Lanzillotti antitrust prize.

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John Asker’s award-winning paper  is titled “The Competitive Effects of Information Sharing.” The paper won the ninth annual Robert F. Lanzillotti prize for the best paper in antitrust economics.

The abstract of the paper reads as follows:

 

“We investigate the impact of information sharing between rivals in a dynamic auction with asymmetric information. Firms bid in sequential auctions to obtain inputs. Their inventory of inputs, determined by the results of past auctions, are privately known state variables that determine bidding incentives. The model is analyzed numerically under different information sharing rules. The analysis uses the restricted experience based equilibrium concept of Fershtman and Pakes (2012) which we refine to mitigate multiplicity issues. We find that increased information about competitors’ states increases participation and inventories, as the firms are more able to avoid the intense competition in low inventory states. While average bids are lower, social welfare is unchanged and output is increased. Implications for the posture of antitrust regulation toward information sharing agreements are discussed.”