Alireza Zarei: A report on my travel to the USA (January 2019)

This report provides a summary of my travel to the Allied Social Science Association (ASSA) Meeting in Florida and then 3 weeks in Harvard University in January 2019. The ASSA is an association of a group of more than 60 academic and professional organizations including the American Economic Association (AEA) and the American Financial Association (AFA). It is a well-received annual meeting over 3 days in early January in a US City. This year’s meeting was in Atlanta on January 4-6th with over 13,450 participants from around the world. I had this great opportunity to attend the ASSA meeting this year during the first few days of my trip: it was a great experience. I attended several sessions on topics interesting to me: international finance, macrofinance and currency markets, financial stability, international trade as well as witnessed Nobel Laureate Luncheon honoring Richard Thaler who got the 2017 Nobel Laureate in Economics: he gave a very impressive talk on the development of the theory of behavioral economics. The luncheon session was chaired by Ben Bernanke. Other speakers were Stefano DellaVigna from University of California-Berkeley, Nicholas Barberis from the Yale University, and Daniel Kahneman from Princeton University. The webcast of the Nobel Laureate luncheon session is available online at https://www.aeaweb.org/webcasts/2019/aea-nobel-luncheon. There are also many more materials available including presented papers and webcasts of other events. I also particularly found this webcast on the concept and idea of machine learning and its application in economics very interesting (https://www.aeaweb.org/webcasts/2019/aea-afa-joint-luncheon-impact-of-machine-learning).

On January 6th, I travelled to Cambridge for the rest of my trip and I spent around 16 days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spending time at the Harvard University under the Sunway grant. This was a wonderful opportunity for me to explore the possibility for research collaboration with the people at the Harvard on the topics of my interest: The HoD introduced me to Prof Dwight Perkins, whom he knows. The visit to the Harvard University further provided me with the opportunity to learn about the cutting-edge approaches and current issues in the applied financial research. I had an opportunity to meet with the staff members at the Ash Center of the Kennedy School of Government. This is located a short distance from the river where the annual competition takes place.

I realized that there are important areas of research with significant policy implications and widespread applications on emerging countries like Malaysia, so Harvard is not an Ivory Tower! This is because such economies are worth studying and Malaysian economy has been growing steadily over the recent years with past growth rate averaging 7.5% over 1975 to 1996. Studying the total factor productivity impact on the economic growth of Malaysia and other economies in the East Asian region is a practical research. In additional to neoclassical growth factors such as human and capital, such studies provide new insights and evidence on how the overall economic growth in these countries are formulated. Moreover, I had an opportunity to meet a number of graduate students of economics and finance and learned about studying and teaching environment at the Harvard University.

I also visited the Smith Campus Center, wherein many students and professors used to gather to study and conduct meetings. I also had the opportunity to attend a walking tour with few newly-joined research fellows, as part of my J1 exchange-visitor program as a short-term scholar of the Harvard University Asia Center. The tour was conducted by Ms Zarrin Foster from the Harvard International Office, and we visited a number of landmarks in the Harvard Square area such as Graduate School of Education, The Cooper Gallery, Beat Restaurant, the Sinclaire, and Brattle Theater. The following picture is taken at the Smith Campus Center after the walking tour with the newly joined fellows and the organizer of the walking tour at the Harvard Square on January 8th, 2019. Ms Zarrin Foster is the lady standing in the middle.