{"id":3518,"date":"2019-07-02T16:19:15","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T14:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/?p=3518"},"modified":"2019-07-02T16:28:07","modified_gmt":"2019-07-02T14:28:07","slug":"economics-allows-systemizing-messy-real-life-phenomena-says-net-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/?p=3518","title":{"rendered":"Economics Allows Systemizing Messy Real-Life Phenomena, Says NET Winner"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>New Economic Talent (NET) competition Winner <a href=\"https:\/\/cep.lse.ac.uk\/_new\/staff\/person.asp?id=10546\">Charoo Anand<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lse.ac.uk\/\">LSE<\/a>) focused on the role of discrimination in the mortgage lending race gap in her paper. We were happy to speak with her about her paper as well as about her future plans. When asked about her other talents, Charoo also told us a bit about her non-economic self.<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>What brought you to studying economics? What do you like about it?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Maths was always my favorite subject as a kid and, when I was doing my A levels, I had fantastic history teachers. If I hadn\u2019t done A-level history, I would have studied pure mathematics at university. My choice to do an economics degree was a sneaky way to avoid dropping either subject.<\/p>\n<p>I think it was a good choice! It\u2019s just super satisfying to look at messy real-life social phenomena and to systemize and quantify them. I really enjoy going back and forth between qualitative human stuff and quantitative methods. I guess most people\u2019s answer to this question is some version of this.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>How did you find out about the NET competition?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Last year\u2019s winner, <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/?p=3382\">Sitong \u2018Jerry\u2019 Ding,<\/a> was in my undergrad. cohort and we both wrote our papers for the same class. When he won, I saw loads of pictures of him on Facebook and he looked so happy! Also, I thought the picture of him with the giant check was a pretty baller. When I realized that I could apply within a year of graduating I thought I should try.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Can you briefly explain what your paper was about?\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Sure! So the question is \u2018Do mortgage lenders discriminate against African-American areas\u2019? And I find that about 60% of the mortgage lending race gap can be attributed to discrimination.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s an important question because there\u2019s a history of institutional bias and, when you look at today\u2019s numbers, there\u2019s still a big race gap. So you have to wonder if this kind of racism still goes on. The issue is that it\u2019s tricky to identify discrimination without running an experiment. Income and racial sorting within cities happen simultaneously so it\u2019s hard to find an area with a different racial composition that doesn\u2019t also have systematically different economic characteristics. I resolve this by looking at African-American chain migration into neighborhoods in Chicago. With chain migration, people follow their friends and family into neighborhoods, rather than self-selecting into areas based on their economic characteristics. This provides a way to pick out areas with higher African-American population shares while controlling for unobservable economic characteristics.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Did your NET experience somehow affect your view on your work?\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To be honest, it was a real ego boost. After working on the same thing for a while, I started to take many of its strengths for granted, while remaining hyper-aware of all its weaknesses. Preparing a presentation forced me to go back to the beginning and to distill the paper down to the most compelling 15-minute story. This exercise reminded me of its strengths and I\u2019m now way more excited to keep working on it. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I still think there are flaws, but I\u2019m now addressing them rather than throwing it all out. Of course, the professors\u2019 feedback will be helpful as I pursue this further. Also, if anyone has any tract-level financial data, please hit me up!<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>You had the chance to meet NET finalists from the previous years; was it somehow useful for you?\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Meeting the previous finalists (and CERGE-EI students) was so fun! I\u2019m so lucky to have been involved during the 5-year event. Honestly, it was like summer camp when you\u2019re younger and you hang out with other kids for two days and feel like you\u2019re already best friends. I\u2019m hoping we all get invited back soon so we can win the Graduation Gala quiz again.<\/p>\n<p>I liked hearing about people\u2019s jobs and hometowns and the military service loopholes in various countries. My school is very international so in some dimensions, it\u2019s incredibly diverse. But when I was at CERGE-EI, I realized that there are some ways in which it really isn\u2019t. Confronting that was useful.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>What are your plans for future studies? Would you like to stay in academia or do you see yourself in some other field?\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I\u2019ll be in academia for a while, I think. I finished my undergrad. in 2018 and over the last year I\u2019ve been working as a research and teaching assistant. I\u2019m having a good time: writing code, reading books, talking about micro, etc. I\u2019d be very happy to keep doing this indefinitely. I\u2019d love to do a PhD. On the other hand, I hate the GRE.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>You won the New Economic Talent competition &#8211; apart from a talent for Economics, what other talents do you possess?\u00a0<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u201cTalent\u201d might be too generous a word but I play a bit of basketball. I recently joined a league and my team is called \u2018Nets and Bolts\u2019. We\u2019ve lost every single game this season but I truly think our ball movement is improving and I have high hopes for the upcoming season. With regards to my talent, I\u2019ve got a pretty reliable jump shot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New Economic Talent (NET) competition Winner Charoo Anand (LSE) focused on the role of discrimination in the mortgage lending race gap in her paper. We were happy to speak with her about her paper as well as about her future plans. When asked about her other talents, Charoo also told us a bit about her &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/?p=3518\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Economics Allows Systemizing Messy Real-Life Phenomena, Says NET Winner<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":3515,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,59,223,143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-awards","category-interview","category-new-economic-talent","category-special-events"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3518"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3523,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions\/3523"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cerge-ei.cz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}