Posts

Michael Powell

/in /by
Powell

Michael Powell

Many of us Bruins reminisce on the moment we decided to come to UCLA. For Dr. Michael Powell this moment occurred at the very top of Janss steps. Experiencing the beauty of campus and Los Angeles from this UCLA gem made it clear that UCLA was the school for him. From then on, Michael describes his life as a “series of good accidents”. At UCLA, Michael’s interest in economics was initially sparked by Professor Ed McDevitt. In particular, he recalls Professor McDevitt’s crystal clear and thought-provoking lectures, always delivered on the whiteboard perfectly without the aid of a single page of notes. After encouragement from Professor McDevitt, Michael decided to pursue economics as a career.

Like many fellow Bruins, Michael Powell joined UCLA as a third-year transfer student from the Bay Area. His jobs at KFC and In-N-Out throughout his years at community college allowed him to focus all his time on academics while at UCLA. Even more, Michael’s experience at these jobs led him to a research career in organizational economics. Michael describes organizational economics as the study of “why organizations look the way they do”. Between his jobs at KFC and In-N-Out, he noticed firsthand how each had a different path for career advancement and how promotion incentives impacted employee productivity and morale. Now, he studies how and why firms design career trajectories for their workers the way they do, and how it impacts their employees throughout their career.

UCLA has more exciting courses than any of us could imagine having the time to take. Whether it be graduate mathematics, astrobiology, or Scandinavian film, UCLA has an overwhelming variety of things to learn. Unless we are lucky enough to be a double (or perhaps triple) Bruin, we only have a few years to take advantage of everything UCLA has to offer. Michael’s solution and recommendation to any Bruin is course auditing. Course auditing provides the chance to learn and experience new topics, without the large time commitment and pressure of grading. While studying for his economics PhD at MIT, Michael took or audited nearly every economics class offered. Auditing gave the opportunity to take advantage of all his time at MIT, learning from renowned economists like Esther Duflo and Amy Finkelstein.

To further maximize his time at UCLA, Michael earned a Master’s degree in economics through the Departmental Scholars Program. This program offered by the economics department allows students to spend an extra year at UCLA to take graduate courses during their fourth and fifth years. Especially as a transfer student, the opportunity to spend another year in Southern California was too good to pass up. Although he would go on to take similar classes in graduate school at MIT, each professor and university brings a different point of view and focus. For a career in economics, this additional perspective is highly valuable in developing the unique skills and intuition needed to approach complex problems in school and beyond. Once Michael started doing graduate work in economics, it was “hard to imagine doing anything else”, and he would go on to earn his PhD in economics at MIT.

Now, Michael is an Associate Professor of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. The responsibilities of the job are twofold: research and teaching. The process of publishing your first papers as a professor is challenging, as papers are often rejected from journals and subject to harsh criticism. However, for Michael this feedback helped develop the tenacity and determination needed to become a successful economist and researcher. At Kellogg, teaching highly engaged MBA students is particularly rewarding. The smaller classes and high levels of student participation provide a unique challenge but an exciting teaching job. Overall, UCLA gave Michael the tools to succeed at the highest level of academia and contribute to the advancement of economics as a researcher, teacher, and collaborator.

by Claire Nelson.

April Franco

/in /by
April_Franco

April Franco

Entrepreneurship and academic research are two words that are rarely used in the same context. However, Dr. April Franco’s illustrious career as a research economist seamlessly blends these two worlds together, producing some of the most innovative research in the fields of management science, industrial organization and applied game theory. Furthermore, her journey through the meandering path of academia provides us with insights that are indispensable to anyone staring down a similar path.

Franco’s transition into economics hints at her entrepreneurial mindset. As an undergraduate majoring in Economics and Philosophy, Franco thought that law school was her obvious calling.

Having worked part-time at a jewelry store frequented by several lawyers, Franco got the chance to ask them questions about a career in law. She learnt that the field of law is very adversarial, one picks (or is assigned) a side and is continually battling the other side. This was not something which April wanted in a career. Around the same time, she got an opportunity, through the various avenues that UCLA Economics offers, to conduct research under the supervision of the renowned Dr. Jack Hirshleifer. She read, among other papers, the work by Kahneman and Tversky in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. In her work and readings, she realized that the process of research appealed to her. She enjoyed how research focused on understanding and discussing existing ideas, then using the existing ideas to push the frontier of human knowledge. She discovered that although there is competition in research, the competition is a race to truth and not a battle against your colleagues. After a summer as a RA at UC Berkeley, she was certain that a career in research was the right choice for her.

Franco’s research career is too extensive to summarize in one article. However, one thing her work has in common is that it focuses on questions which she believes are important to ask and intellectually intriguing. When asked to choose her opus magnus, she wryly replied that it is like being asked to choose amongst one’s children. Nonetheless, she obliged our request. She talked about her job market paper which was among the first papers to explore the origins of entrepreneurs. Hitherto, most economic papers argued that if there is an opportunity for strictly positive profits, new firms would enter the industry. However, the literature did not explore where these entrepreneurs came from. “It was as if they came from ether”, jokes Franco. Her paper, which she wrote in collaboration with Dr. Darren Filson, argued that one of the major source of new firms was employee spin-outs. That is employees quitting their jobs to start independent firms that operate in the same industry as their former employers. In the age of the PayPal mafia this may seem rather clear, but her paper, backed with evidence from the hard drive industry, was groundbreaking and pioneered the literature in this field.

Throughout her research career, she has further explored the question of employee spin-outs. She has also explored several other questions such as the impact of overconfidence in management and questions relating to intra-firm organization.  One of the hardest tasks in research is coming up with meaningful and impactful research questions. Franco believes that her undergraduate education in economics has helped her in developing research questions, remarking that North American universities, such as UCLA, are exceptionally good at developing the skills necessary to conjure research questions. As she recalls, during graduate school several of her classmates had gone to universities that focused on fostering technical skills. During her first year, when the classes were very technical, Franco felt as if she was playing catch up. However, once she learned the technical skills, it was her ability to use the technical skills in asking and answering impactful questions that pushed her career forward.

Franco remarks that undergraduates considering a career in academia should consider both the intellectual freedom that academia affords and the fact that it requires one to be entrepreneurial and self-motivated. If one decides to pursue a career in research, Franco’s advice is to focus on the fundamentals. She recommends taking challenging mathematics classes, learning how to use computers for analysis (like R and Python), and developing the ability to write effectively. These skills coupled with the insatiable desire to work on questions will no doubt bolster a career in research.

By Harsh Gupta.

David K. Levine

/in /by

David K. Levine

Professor David K. Levine graduated from UCLA in 1977, earning a dual degree of Bachelors in Mathematics and a Masters in Economics. He was enrolled as a UCLA student during high school, but he later studied at Harvard University for a year before coming back to UCLA in his second year and finishing his degrees. He decided to be an economics professor since he was a freshman, because his initial education in economics was poor, as the economic consensus that he was taught seemed to defy common sense. He enrolled at UCLA as a math major while still taking economics courses because he believed a rigorous math background would help him conduct economic research. Eventually, he enrolled in graduate courses in economics as well after being convinced by his life-long mentor Professor Jack Hirshleifer. Professor Levine felt that there was major space for improvement in the field. Eventually, his motivation to improve economics and impart knowledge to others caused him to enter academia which led him to where he is today.

Although UCLA has a reputation for being a large and impersonal place, professor Levine’s experience here was quite the opposite. During his time as a student, there were very few math majors so it was easy to establish contact with other math majors and the faculty. Professor Levine was also given a key to the Math Library, which was his favorite place on campus and where he would often be found solving mathematical problems. Likewise, he had the opportunity to interact and learn from other economics graduate students when pursuing his dual degree. Crucially, he was also a research assistant to Professor Jack Hirshleifer, a professor emeritus of economics at UCLA and received lifelong mentorship from him. For Professor Levine, UCLA offered a great amount of resources that helped him become successful after graduation.

Professor Levine has garnered a long list of achievements throughout his career: He currently serves as joint chair for Department of Economics and Robert Schuman Center at the European University Institute. He is also the John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. But he never kept such achievements in mind as he pursued economics; his motivation was always to push the frontier of this field and to advance the areas of economics he was most interested in.

When asked about the secret to conducting successful research, Professor Levine contends that it is necessary to come up with different explanations for economic phenomena and to determine their feasibility. At the heart of it, he states that common sense is absolutely necessary when conducting economic research. To this point, he brings up the example of intellectual property. The Disney Corporation controls copyrights in the US. Interestingly enough, the costs to the public due to copyrights are much greater than their benefits to Disney. Despite this, the reason why the public does not scrutinize Disney is because the cost per person is trivial. Thus, the public has little incentive to lobby against Disney. However, Professor Levine adds that this conclusion might not be so straight forward without a rigorous mathematical model to back it. He states that the general consensus amongst economists is to make lobbying more expensive or illegal to prevent Disney from lobbying extensively for maintaining control over copyrights. However, from his research alongside Professor Michele Boldrin, they concluded that lobbying should instead be made cheaper. They argue that Disney is able to lobby extensively because Disney makes it harder for the public to lobby against them. Making lobbying cheaper could therefore incentivize the public to actually take action. He drives the point that economic theory forces economists to look at the whole picture instead of erroneously looking at just a single piece of it.

Although our interview did not delve in depth into Professor Levine’s research (Readers can learn more about him and his research at http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/david.htm) we did talk about two of his books. The first book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, was co-written with Michele Boldrin. Together, they argued against intellectual property like copyrights and patents, for stifling innovation and competition instead of encouraging it. In the mid 90’s, economists typically viewed intellectual property as a necessary evil because, although it gave rise to monopolies, it was required to innovate. Before professors Levine and Boldrin set out to research innovation, they too shared the same view. However, after building general equilibrium models to study innovations across the economy, they soon found that this view was false. After spending years researching various empirical studies, they concluded that the importance of intellectual property in driving innovation was overstated, proving that even without monopoly power, there was incentive to innovate. The second book, Is Behavioural Economics Doomed?, addresses the backlash against mainstream economics for failing to consider the irrationality of human nature and the rising influence of behavioural economics. Having worked in the field of behavioral economics over the years, Professor Levine noted that there were many good and bad economic theories established in the discipline. His book presents a grim outlook on the field of behavioral economics, not because the discipline is failing but because he recognizes that eventually the good theories of behavioral economics will be incorporated into mainstream economics while the bad theories will be discarded.

Lastly, we asked him to give current undergraduate students some advice. His advice was simple: take full advantage of the resources that UCLA offers before graduating. There is always time to specialize later on so students should feel free to take classes that appeal to them even if it is not relevant to their major. Drawing from personal experience, despite pursuing a dual degree in math and economics, professor Levine took a wide variety of classes ranging from history to Russian. That’s the beauty of UCLA’s holistic curriculum: the opportunity to learn subjects that you wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to learn upon graduating. Remember to make the most of your education.

By Ng Xiang Yang, with Adithya Kumar and Charles Qian.