As part of my journey to get an interview for the Analyst job at a bank in the city I live in, I decided to read the PhD thesis of the person responsible for a potential interview. I found him on LinkedIn and looked through his CV, and learned that he has a PhD in Economics. Now, I have 0 experience in Economics, although I did take a course during my bachelor, but that doesn’t count … it was so long ago that I can’t remember anything really. However, I have a huge interest in Economics, and since finally I decided to pursue something that I am passionate about (and that is numbers & mathematics), I need to turn my thoughts ( me saying I am interested in Economics), into actions (me actually taking action and reading about it).
I decided to record my first reaction, as part of an experiment I want to conduct on myself. The experiment is to see how I react when I first read something so advanced as a PhD thesis in Economics with no prior knowledge of the matter. Then, I’ll have a list of few financial courses that I will take for the next couple of weeks. I will go through all the courses, and then I will come back to the thesis, and read it again. I want to see how much my perspective changes, while reading the same material, but with different starting point (first 0 knowledge, second: some knowledge).
So, here it goes:
“Real investment” , wait what, could there be such thing as a fake investment? I should keep reading. “Euler equation” … finally something I know about. But this Euler guy must with a different person than the one I learned about. My Euler equations are related to fluid dynamics, I am pretty sure this one here it is not about that. A short google search takes me to the Euler equations on mitsloan.mit.edu. Nice 6 pages paper on those equations. Not that complicated. It reminds me why I used to love mathematics so much back in school. I kind of miss it. Another search takes me to the Standford University webpage where I get this:
Macroeconomics … that is a new funny word. I heard about macroeconomics before, have no idea what it is. I could start guessing, but that will not be so helpful, better start reading.
Now, let’s call the author of the PhD thesis Jake. Jake continues talking about his research which was on strategies on investment behavior. This make me want to continue reading. I was planning just to read the abstract, but I find myself wanting to read more and more.
Now there are already two keywords that I need to dig into and find out more: “real investments” and “aggregate investments“. I, of course, can google everything, but I don’t want to mess up my little experiment.
I continue to read. There is a survey done in 2012 on differences on how small and large businesses plan their investments. New keywords for me: cost of capital, and access to financial capital. And then comes the Q-theory model of Tobin. What is that? Ok, this little experiment of mine went the wrong direction. I was expecting to start reading, getting lost on all the new extravagant words, and decide to come back to read again after I am done with the courses that I have purchased. Instead, I find myself finding it so interesting that I will continue reading for the rest of the day though the thesis. Good one, Jake, now my PhD research on phase change materials goes to waste :)))
30 minutes later …
Oh, the papers are not included in the PhD thesis draft that I found online. It says that the papers are awaiting publication. I see his thesis was submitted or defended in March 2020, so, it could take a long time for the papers to be available, depending on the Journal. I am surprised though that he didn’t mentioned in which Journals he submitted them. For sure not the International Journal of Refrigeration 🙂 Probably something like Journal of Economics, or Finance or something similar. Another possibility could be that he published some sensitive information from different companies, and he is not allowed to make them public yet? I know sometimes it happens like that. When students use real data from real companies, sometimes the companies wants you to wait few years before you publish your results openly, when the specific data is not that relevant anymore and the competition cannot take advantage of knowing it.
Remember when you go to the cinema to see a movie, and they have those advertising on an even cooler movie, they give you a little bit of intro of that one, and right when they get into interested in it, and you decide you want to watch it, they stop it, and say : coming soon …. Yeah, that is my feeling right now 😀 Jake got me interesting on this surveys and his research, and now all I got was … coming soon 🙂 Still, good stuff, good stuff.
Leave a Reply