Traveling through Europe, I noticed a huge Hello Kitty fan base mainly in Italy. This post is dedicated to my friend in Milan who holds a Hello Kitty keychain (and my Argentinean friend who has a similar key chain):

As seen in Milan…

As seen in Venice…

Even guys carry it…

I wonder if anyone wears these Hello Kitty lingerie underneath…

She who has a Hello Kitty keychain…

(Versailles, France) Quotable Queens.

Some of the quotes I liked from the conference:

Aniqa on an idea: “not just optimistic; its realistic”

Joke on China CCP: “Hu Jintao was in a taxi and when they reached a junction, the taxi driver asked if Hu wanted to turn left or right. Hu Jintao said turn right, but leave the left blinker on.”

Ackerman on how bankers are perceived now: “privatizing gains and socializing losses”

Lord Griffiths on Martin Wolf being made a commander of the British “Empire”: “if anything else, this shows that the British have not lost their sense of humor”

Martin Wolf quoting someone else on banking: “Success breeds excess and excess breeds panic”

Wolf on CDOs: “what was toxic turned out radioactive”

Wolf on risk: “those best able to manage it ended up being those least able to understand it”
“[long quote from International Institute of Finance outlining failures]…in other words, we screwed up”

Wolf on the future: “no clear and decisive ideal financial system”
Wolf on the balance between local and global: “local politics is destroying global public goods”

Someone from Credit Suisse: “Risk is seen more as a compliance function, not a business decision”

(Paris, France) A pleasant life with pleasant people

The past three weeks have been filled with adventure as I crossed St Gallen and Zurich to reach Venice, moved onward to Rome, drifted to Milan, and finally ended up in Paris. My next few posts should cover some of the highlights. I am surprised how warm and helpful so many people were even in the crowded cities of Paris and Rome.

After another round of incredibly enriching conversations at this year’s St Gallen Symposium, and an incredible trip meeting interesting people while travelling in Europe, I am more convinced that moving to Europe to work will greatly benefit my personal and intellectual development. I hope things work according to plan for once, as although serendipity had been kind to me, I now see a clear path that I truly wish to pursue.

I am now in Seoul and it is great to be forcing myself to speak Korean again. I have set myself the ambitious goal of not falling back on the “I am not Korean” line and switching to English when the conversation gets hard. Looking Korean = high expectations = faster learning.

(Havana, Cuba)

My conference in Switzerland is coming to an end soon and I will be moving on to Italy and France. I will spend the time on the train thinking about my post-graduate plans. The conference has been interesting as I had many more significant and deep conversations than I usually have, which have allowed me to learn a lot more than I usually do at such events. Posts during this period will be infrequent.

I also recently received another grant for research over the summer. This accompanied by good grades this semester, positive progress on a very special ongoing project, and another two possible published papers has me feeling really good about my university time.

(Havana, Cuba)

I never understood why PhD programs are so well-funded. Most decent programs offer a decent amount of stipend along with tuition waivers for their candidates. The teaching that these PhD candidates is probably far from repaying the expense lavished on them. Most of these candidates go on to teach at other schools instead of the organization that funds their training. Hence, there exist a lot of externalities that are captured by other parties.
I talked to professors about this issue. Some of them suggested that there is an implicit agreement to hire graduates from a small grouping of top universities. However, what is to stop a school to game the system by reducing funding for their PhD candidates? Reputation perhaps? Also, what about schools where candidates tend to be largely downwardly mobile (e.g. Wharton)? Externalities are unlikely to be recaptured back…

On another note, I just took the GRE in the middle of final week and with less than adequate preparation. I did relatively well on it, although I wished I had finished the quantitative section as I could if I had been more familiar with the format.

(Xian, China) Posters of a recent past

I published a paper with the student-run Michigan Journal of Business recently on China’s economic impact on Southeast Asia. It has been a great learning process as the journal provided comments on how I could improve the paper. I do not think this paper adds significantly to the literature on the topic, being just a survey of other papers in this area, but I am still glad to be able to share it. The abstract is below:

With the advent of China’s explosive growth in recent decades has come the fear that its cheap labor, together with its increasing prowess in science and technology, will crowd out Southeast Asian economies in both the high value-added end of the economic ladder as well as in the low value-added manufacturing sector. However, there is another view of China that rejects this new economic paradigm and the zero-sum game it implies. Here, the theory of comparative advantage in trade still holds, and instead of an economic competitor dominating the entire economic ladder, it is argued that there are complementarities in economies that allow all parties to benefit from increased consumption. Under this view, the increased consumption of the newly prosperous Chinese consumers and of the burgeoning Chinese market will enable Southeast Asian countries to prosper from trade with China. This paper evaluates each of these viewpoints, arriving at mixed results. While there is some evidence of trade competition, data also suggests the existence of economic complementation, with Chinese growth providing opportunities for increased growth and economic integration within Southeast Asia. Furthermore, the varied economic structures of Southeast Asia mean that this impact could be different among the individual countries in this region.