1. What made you decide to pursue economics?

It was in college, actually, that I started becoming interested in it because I was looking for a job. I had started out as a psychology major and realized that getting a job with a bachelor's degree in psychology was not going to be the easiest thing to do. So, in deciding to make a switch, I said, ‘well the people who hire are businesses, so why don’t I get a business degree!’. I had no idea what I was doing, but once I started studying, I was like ‘This is really cool. This is really interesting stuff’. 

2. We saw in your instructor bio that you started out working in corporate finance. How was your experience in that field? What would your advice be for those entering said field?

I had a chance to do some investing, so I was in charge of our insurance program -- a company has assets, you buy property insurance, liability insurance, worker’s compensation insurance -- various things like that. So I was in charge of the insurance program, meaning I had to deal with the insurance and figure out what insurance we need to have, and then buy insurance for us. And then I was involved when we were raising money, but one of the things that I was particularly involved in as we raised money at the time through limited partnership. So I was involved in restoring a limited partnership, doing some of the work behind them, and then I was actually in an investor relations role in dealing with investors who bought into the limited partnership, decided to come out to the company and wanted to see what they had invested in. So people ran tours of various things like that, so I started on that one. Then, I decided that the insurance part was really interesting, and so I spent 10 years as an insurance broker, working with clients to help find the right insurance policy, so essentially you’re the ‘pro’, the middle person, who goes out and works with the client to identify what kind of insurance they’re looking for. The insurance company I was interested in specialized in biotech, because this was the area that I had been in and was an area that had really struggled to find insurance -- we ended up investing five million dollars in the company to help us get insurance. So it’s crazy stuff! We didn’t have five million sitting around for nothing to do; it’s actually a hard decision, but we ended up spending ten years helping to develop the market for bio or insurance for biotech companies which meant helping insurance companies calm down and say, ‘Look, it sounds scarier than it actually is. 

3. Why do you think biotech struggles to get that insurance?

At the time, science was a bit different, and so biotech companies liked to talk a lot about how their technology was different and fresh, insurance companies like hearing that. So, a lot of what I had to say is actually, it’s important to think about the opportunities, and, at the end of the day, we’re a really responsible company, and we’re not gonna do anything crazy, and everything is very much under control. But, you had to go through a process of finding ways to reach out and assuring them. The most interesting ones is that there’s a type of insurance directors and officers liability insurance which all public companies buy because, otherwise, they won’t be able to get directors to serve on the board of directors, but it’s to protect them against lawsuits from outside as well. They didn’t understand the biotech business model, which is to go for many years, maybe 10/15 years, and some cases, before making a profit, had to try to convince them that this is actually OK, and that you need to look at the financial statements differently because there are companies building toward the future. They just don't happen to have revenues right now, and so their investors are paying for them to get into this research and it’s okay that they’re losing money every year so they're not going to get sued over this loss. So that’s part of the business plan is to lose money until they actually get the products they wanted, so it was an interesting thing to play around with. 

4. How do you choose which papers we discuss in class? Is it based on your experience?

The class only assumes precalculus so I can't get technical- well I cheat on that sometimes, we get technical but I try not to get it to be overwhelmingly technical. So the first question is “Is it understandable?” and the second question is "Is it interesting, is it something that we can have a conversation about?” because the purpose of the advanced topics class is not to teach specific theories or something like that. It's to get students to understand how research plays out in social science and what kinds of research is being done. We should look at it and say “you know, there was an idea that didn't pan out this way”. I liked the three different places this year we had. We looked at some controversy up and said, “Oh, they wrote a paper that wasn't good” mostly because I want students to learn critical thinking. One of the things about critical thinking is not just to accept that it was in a journal so it must be correct. It was that they were trying to say something important but did not actually pan out. I also try to find things that are fresh and new as a way of showing my students that you know economics continues to evolve, people are continuing to do research. 

5.  How would you characterize the main differences between corporate finance, financial services, and data analysis?

On the corporate finance side, you're trying to identify the needs of your company, and so you’re constantly thinking about reactions. You're trying to assemble the right resources for the company, you’ve got a responsibility to make sure that cash is available at the time, that the company's protected. You’ve got your responsibilities as part of a team that's trying to run this company; your responsibility happens to be on the cash side of things: “Do we actually have enough cash that is going to cover the issue that day?”. I would have to have communications with the people who paid bills and say “Please let me know when there's a big bill that you're going to pay so that I can make sure that I liquidate some investments and have them, you know, available to pay things”.  So you know, it was little things. We make sure that every month we have some money, extra money, in the account to cover payroll because payroll would be a big thing. So that's the kind of thing there in financial services. A lot of times, you're selling.  One of the big things was getting new clients and every year I would be rewarded by the fact that I was able to bring in new clients. I brought in dozens of new clients to the firm, so I was flown out to, I don't know, three or four different cities to go be part of the pitch to try to win an account, which was kind of fun. Good news, I think we won all of them! It was fun to be part of that to see how the other offices did it as well, but mostly the job is to sit down with the client and try to understand what their needs are and to point out things that they don't necessarily realize. You are trying to keep track of what is available in the market and what kinds of things you can actually do for them, so you don't want to go out and say “I'd love to ensure that but I can't that that put you in a bad position too” so it was basically trying to direct shopping through our portal. You would then access the internet through our portal and by doing that, we would get a commission from the websites from Amazon. Basically, you were shopping on behalf of your school and a little bit of the money that was involved in your shopping would be donated back to the school. It was the kind of thing that PTAs do and stuff.