Christopher Gandrud
(간드루드 크리스토파)

Research is an unpredictable thing. You head in one direction, but end up going another. Here is a recent example: A co-author and I had an idea for a paper. It's a long story, but basically we wanted to compare banks in the US to those in the EU. This was a situation where our desire to explore a theory was egged on by, what we believed, was available data. In the US it's easy to gather data on banks because the regulators have a nice website where they release the filings banks send them. The data is in a really good format for statistical analysis. US done. We thought our next move would be to quickly gather similar data for EU banks and we would be on our way. First we contacted the UK's Financial Conduct Authority . Surprisingly, they told us that not only did they not release this data, but it was actually illegal for them to do so. Pretty frustrating. Answers to one question stymied by a lack of data. Argh. I guess we'll just keep looking to see what kind of...

It's always a good day when you notice your PhD research overlapping with what's going on in the news. PhD research might actually matter! This happened to me when I was listening to a recent Fresh Air interview with NY Times reporter Louise Story about why the United States has prosecuted so few people involved in the financial crisis. A couple points caught my attention: Regulatory agencies, especially the SEC, are understaffed. (not really news to most people interested in this stuff) Since 2008 the Justice Department has officially allowed financial companies to defer prosecutions if they conduct their own investigation into alleged wrongdoing. (that's more like it) The combined effect of understaffing and essentially outsourcing investigations to financial companies is that regulators are: Losing the capacity to do their own investigations of financial institutions Not going to even be able to critically evaluate the investigations...