My name is Konstantin. I graduated from NES in 2023. I had the pleasure of encountering Hosny, who undoubtedly stands out as one of the most inspiring people I have ever met during my time at New Economic School. Initially, our collaboration began when I worked for him as a RA, and it further developed when I enrolled in his elective course on Family Economics. Through Hosny's guidance, I not only gained knowledge about academic papers and theoretical models but also learned about the philosophy that underlies them. His support during these challenging times has been invaluable. I wholeheartedly recommend that every student at NES interact with Hosny more. Not only is he an impressive researcher, but he is also an outstanding individual with a great personality. Hosny's dedication to supporting NES students is admirable, and I am grateful for the advice and assistance he has provided.

Date: 06/18/2023

Class: MAE'23

My name is Aleksandra Snegireva, I am an NES MAE’22 graduate. Most of my research at NES has been done under Hosny’s advice, it was a great experience that helped me to develop passion and confidence in my work. 

With Hosny, I have done projects in Family Economics and Economic Growth courses, my term paper, and my master thesis. Despite the second year at NES was not easy for me, my research experience during this time was as much enjoyable as possible because of his support and guidance. 

I had an idea to study women's political representation and its effect on different factors of women’s well-being, such as their survival rate, fertility, their interfamily bargaining power, and different aspects of their identity, like preferences in career and education. The first step in my research was to find a robust methodology that can provide evince on the causal inference of women's political representation. After a thorough analysis of the existing literature on this topic, I figured out that a methodology in one very popular paper on women's political representation needs to be corrected to provide robust results. The paper studied the effect of women representatives in State Legislative Assembly in India on documented crime against women. It used a share of constituencies with close elections, where women won men in all constituencies in a district with close elections between men and women with any outcome. The absents of essential controls violated exclusion restrictions in their 2SLS strategy and resulted in insignificant estimates. When I corrected the methodology, I had a significant and positive effect on women's political representation on crime against women, and this forced me to concentrate on the mechanism that stays behind these results. Due to Hosny’s invaluable help at this stage, I managed to rapidly change the research’s direction and find data for the realization of my ideas. He also helped me to reach people with experience in research on India, whose recommendations speeded up my study significantly.

During the productive research experience under Hosny’s guidance, I learned that the better is not always the harder, and improved my skills in choosing the most promising directions in my studies. I continue to work with Hosny as a Teaching Assistant on Economic Growth and plan to apply on P.h.D this year.

Date: 08/12/2022

Class: MAE'22

Hi! My name is Anton Brennerman, and I graduated from NES in July 2022. I've interacted with Hosny very intensively during my second year of studies at NES. The interaction was very fruitful and it took place on different occasions: I took his courses in Family Economics and Growth Economics, and also was a teaching assistant on his 1st year course Macroeconomics 2. 

To begin with, let me tell a little bit about my background first. Before NES I graduated from the Economics Faculty of MSU, and before my studies at NES began I already knew that economics is a very interesting and important field of science. However, by that time I wasn't sure whether I wanted to develop further in academic economics, or find something for me in the industry. To be honest, 2 years at NES served as a huge motivation and inspiration for me to pursue an academic career. And I wouldn't be lying if I said that Hosny played the most important role in this for me. 

I truly think that everyone at NES should devote time to interacting with Hosny. He is a unique professor and advisor in the sense that he combines an unspeakable passion for research and teaching, an excellent talent to explain even complex things in a very intuitive and comprehensible manner, and a very caring and helping attitude towards his students. He is definitely one of the most inspirational people I've met during my long story of studying economics, and he is also one of the most entertaining lecturers I've had a chance to listen to. I want to emphasize that Hosny always stresses the primary importance of intuition and ideas behind any theoretical or empirical model, and in my opinion this is exactly how economics should be taught. 

As an example of a research project that I wrote on Hosny's courses, I can tell about the project in Growth Economics about information transmission and poverty traps. I have found that vertical information transmission (from parents to children) about benefits of pursuing education can generate a poverty trap for poor families under uncertainty, even if there are no credit constraints, and everyone has the same investment opportunities. Hosny's lectures and discussions on poverty traps substantially helped me to come up with this topic and develop it into a research project. 

Regarding my future, I'm currently planning to pursue an academic career and to apply to PhD programs in the near future.

Date: 07/04/2022

Class: MAE'22

My name is Nikita Belyi. I graduated from NES in July 2020. I have interacted with Hosny intensively during the second year of study at NES 2019/2020. We worked in different ways: Hosny was my thesis advisor and I took his courses Family Economics and Economic Growth and also I was a Teaching Assistant on his course Macroeconomics II.

In my opinion, the main outcome and lesson which I took from the work with Hosny is the complex approach in economic research. Hosny had taught me how to see the intuition and ideas behind the mathematics and coefficients in regressions. What is more, I really appreciate Hosny’s teaching approach which provides a full storyline starting from the motivation, prerequisites, and research question to each model and finalizing with the economic outcomes, extensions, and added value of the model to the understanding of the certain economic phenomenon.

In my thesis, I extended the existing theory about parenting and parent’s choices under the economic view. More precisely, I considered the effect of monetary factors such as parent’s income on the way they rear their children. I investigated that parents with higher income tend to be more paternalistic over their children. Contrary to the existing literature I found that the patience of the children chosen by parents and the child’s effort during studying also depends on the income which adds non-monotonic relations to paternalism. Additionally, I found empirical evidence on the importance of income in the explanation and description of parenting. 

Date: 01/01/2021

Class: MAE'20

My name is Daniil Shertsnev. I graduated from NES in July 2020. I have interacted with Hosny intensively during 2019 as I've taken his courses in Family Economics and Economic Growth. I've learned from that experience how to build theoretical models, incorporate ideas I have into closed mathematical form, and apply them to work on a variety of research questions. Both courses provided me with an opportunity to meet the cutting edge research topics and find out what are basic approaches in modern Economics.

My project in Family is about the influence of social interaction on the decision to marry or cohabit. Considering two periodic models, I showed that changing the distribution of the agents in sense of the first-order stochastic dominance leads to violating of assortative matching, usually observed for basic social interaction models. Working with dynamic social networks under the quadratic complementarity, I showed that changing sensitivity to the actions of others and changing the position within the network forces agent to marry, if she initially wanted to cohabit. This project was my first research proposal. Hosny helped me to formulate the idea and form it into good research.

My project in Growth Economics is about the dissemination of the microfinance program in a social network. I have found that more educated agents not only participate less actively in the program but also share the information about it with lower probability. Discussions of microfinance papers during the course helped me to structure my research and broaden my knowledge in people’s behavior patterns. This project transformed into my Master thesis.

Currently, I'm a first-year Ph.D. student at HSE. In the future, I am considering a Ph.D. in economics abroad.

Date: 06/23/2020

Class: MAE'20

My name is Maxim Bakhtin. I graduated from NES in July 2019. I have interacted with Hosny intensively during 2018 as I've taken his course in Family Economics. I've learned from that experience how to present an idea in the form of a story and support it with a theoretical model and empirical evidences.

My project in Family Economics is about cohabitation - how it might be used by women as a labor market signal to show their dedication to building a career.

Currently, I'm a first-year Ph.D. student at Stanford Economics.

Date: 07/31/2019

Class: MAE'19

My name is Yulia Filippova, I graduated from NES in July 2019. I have interacted with Hosny intensively during 2018/2019 as he has been my thesis advisor, and I also have taken his courses in Family Economics and Economic Growth. I've learned from that experience that the decisions taken on family level (e.g. about children’s education, about spending and investment from household income) are extremely important on the country level. Key features of economy can result from intra-family decisions.

My thesis is about educational assortative mating in Russia. I study the phenomenon of assortative mating which implies that couples with similar level of schooling are formed more frequently that it would be expected under random pairing. I also study how this phenomenon has evolved over the last 20 years and suggest some possible explanations of observed changes. During the whole process of my work Hosny has been very supportive advisor, and I’m thankful for the assistance and help provided by him.

Date: 08/19/2019

Class: MAE'19

My name is Adel Khusnulgatin and I had a pleasure to work and learn from Hosny during my study at NES in 2018 - 2019. I took both Hosny's optional courses, Family Macroeconomics and Economic Growth, and was amazed by the intuition hidden inside complex theoretical models. We all grasped the idea that economic research could and should make our world a better place, and behind each paper there are intricate mechanisms, there is a reason for study, there is a story. 

At that time I decided to write two projects: theoretical and empirical ones. I started from the theory and explained an increase in cohabitation rates as a response to the steady growth in females relative to males wages. Intuitively, women consume more when they have husbands, but the family public good production highly depends on the quality of a husband; hence, if a female has higher relative wage and marriage is a costly commitment, then she can wait longer for an appropriate husband and cohabit with not good enough males. In my empirical paper I was intrigued, whether Russian GDP growth in the years from 1993 to 2014 was driven by factor inputs as in the USSR or the transition to market economy have changed things a lot. I concluded that about 50% of Russian GDP growth is explained by the change in Total Factor Productivity.  

Date: 11/01/2019

Class: MAE'19

My name is Alexander Petrov. I graduated from NES in July 2019. One of my favourite courses was Economic Growth which was read by Hosny Zoabi. I felt that he really cared to deliver a message to us, students. His presentations were really elaborate and easy to follow. Also, I enjoyed discussing my course project with the professor. Hosny was open to a broad range of topics and helped formulate the better research question along the way. In my project, I tried to study the process of unification among separate ethnic groups under the hood of a single state.

Currently I’m about to start my PhD at the University of Chicago.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions (anpetrov@nes.ru).

Date: 08/07/2019

Class: MAE'19

My name is Alexander Tishin. I graduated from NES in July 2019. I have interacted with Hosny intensively during my second year at NES as one of his students in Economic Growth course. The main task of this course was to write a mini-research since the duration of the course was about two months it was a very challenging task. I've learned from that experience how to manage my time, I obtained skills in writing a scientific paper. Moreover, Economic Growth course was also very interesting and expanded my understanding of the reasons for the poverty traps, inequality, etc. Hosny as a lecturer gave amazing classes, brought new information in an accessible form and was always ready to communicate with students. I only regret that I did not take his course in Family Economics. 

My project in Growth is about the connection between the religiosity of people and their cognitive skills. I find a negative correlation between church attendance and the results of the standardized tests in Math. The analysis is performed at the countries’ level and, therefore, subject to endogeneity problem. However, I've learned from that experience how to overcome difficulties in research in a short time. How to present the results which are not the ideal. So, it was a very useful experience. 

Currently, I'm working at the Bank of Russia as a lead economist. I'm working on macroeconomic and monetary policy research. 

Finally, I’d like to advise future students. After the first year, you may have doubts about Hosny’s courses in the second year. Forget about it. Feel free to take both courses. Furthermore, your outcome from these courses will be much better if you do not only attend lectures but also you communicate with Hosny. 

Date: 05/08/2019 

Class: MAE'19

My name is Elena Istomina. I am a NES MAE’18 graduate. I have interacted with Hosny intensively during 2017 as I’ve taken his courses in Family Economics and Economic Growth. These courses truly broadened my horizons on what stories economists may tell. They gave me a totally new perspective on interconnection between family lives, family-related decisions and economic outcomes. 

My project in Growth is about the discrepancy in education between children coming from rich and poor families, which can stem from a signalling role of education. Working on this project, I appreciated greatly Hosny’s mentorship on how one should convey her ideas in a paper. I have also learnt from this experience that standard microeconomic frameworks and methods can be incorporated into the models to answer purely macroeconomic questions.

Currently I am a second-year PhD student at the University of Chicago.

Date: 07/30/2019

Class: MAE'18

My name is Arseniy Stolyarov, I graduated from NES in July 2018. I have interacted with Hosny intensively during 2017 as I've taken his courses in Family Economics and Economic Growth. From these lectures I learned that sometimes even extremely simple models might help you to grasp the reality better.

My project in Family Economics called "Too much love might hurt" was based on the idea that too much love to your children might actually hurt them. I constructed a theoretical model that showed that there might be some cases at which lower coefficient for a spouse's/child's utility might make a Pareto improvement. In a dynamic setting it might lead to the overproduction of human capital capital across time and, consequently, to the non-optimal growth.

My Growth project called “Two more explanations of poverty: evolutionary and behavioral” proposed new models to explain poverty trap. First of them was a slight modification of Elliott evolutionary game theory model: there were two assets in the economy, the common and a more sophisticated one, the latter giving higher expected return, but, which mechanics can be understood only by some proportion of individuals. Unsophisticated individuals followed choices of their neighbors. Then, several thousands of Monte-Carlo simulations were performed and showed that the higher level of sophistication in the world increases the gap between the rich and the poor. Although the poverty is still explained, in some sense by luck in such model, it allows the unlucky, but sophisticated individuals to become richer, but not allowing their environment to grow faster than the rich society. Also, the model explains factors influencing the gap (sophistication of the world, proportion of “smarter” agents in the society, structure of social links).

Currently I'm a 1st year Ph.D student at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Date: 08/21/2019

Class: MAE'18

My name is Mariia Karibova. I graduated from NES in July 2018. I have interacted with Hosny intensively in 2017-2018 as he has been my thesis advisor for my final BA year. I've learned from that experience how to conduct empirical research on family economics, including the Placebo test and control on possible economic trends.

My thesis is about the effect of birth control pill on women economic empowerment.

Currently I'm a 2020 year Master student at Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia (Master in Business Analytics).

Date: 08/20/2019

Class: BAE'18

My name is Sergei Bazylik and I graduated from NES in July 2017. I have interacted with Hosny intensively during 2016/2017 as I've taken his courses in Family Economics and Economic Growth and worked for him as an RA. My major takeaway from that experience was the focus on minimalistic and elegant modeling approach. Family Economics models and more general class of multiple agent interaction/bargaining models are very prone to grow unsolvable in a matter of a couple augmentations. Working with Hosny and studying in his classes I learned how to squeeze as much as possible from as simple model as you can write while preserving the main intuition of the story that I'm trying to tell. And the skill of always keeping the main intuition of the story on the back of your mind when you make modeling choices just could not be overrated.  This experience helped me with transition to my master thesis - a work that naturally requires more independent research, and guides me in my current work.

My thesis is about optimal communication inside the firms producing different goods, where product managers may have a range of conflicting/aligned incentives but always benefit from the better quality information about other departments' production. Even though this thesis is not directly related to the topics I worked on with Hosny, I was always able to discuss my research with Hosny and receive his advice.

My project in Family and Growth is about endogenous production weights in intrafamily bargaining, where the bargaining weights are defined by monetary income and home production (with marketization option) contributed by each spouse. The focus was mostly on developing and solving (at least approximately) this model to accommodate a recent set of empirical facts on intrafamily bargaining that was not well described without accounting for home production and its possible marketization.

I also worked with Hosny as an RA. I assisted him with the project of firms sector dynamics. I do not think that I can easily separate my learning process with Hosny into separate parts like classes, RA work or separate discussions. To me it felt as a very natural flow stemming from the main focus on elegance of the model serving a well defined research question. 

Currently I'm a raising 3rd year Ph.D student at the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.

Date: 08/19/2019

Class: MAE'16

My name is Evgenii Fadeev. I graduated from NES in July 2016. At NES, I took two Hosny’s classes (Family Economics and Economic Growth), and I was working on the project about technology diffusion/adoption though social interactions between people and its effect on economic development. This project was one of my first research proposals, and through my discussions with Hosny I have learned the first steps in formulating a research idea and writing it in a paper. This experience helped me a lot in writing my Master Thesis. Although the topic of the thesis was outside of growth/family field, Hosny's general advises helped me to better structure my thoughts into clear economic statements. My master thesis was about information disclosure (Bayesian Persuasion) to multiple agents who can communicate on a network. 

Currently I am a 4th year PhD Student at Harvard University.

Date: 08/18/2019

Class: MAE'16

My name is Alexey Khazanov, I graduated from NES in July 2014. I first met Hosny when I took his Economic Growth and Family Macroeconomics classes in my second year of Master’s degree, and I also was his TA for the first year core Macroeconomics class back then. Hosny was extremely passionate about teaching, and from this part of our interaction I learned that it can be very exciting to have an opportunity to teach students cutting edge research topics, including your own papers, and that composing problem sets can bring some new research insights. 

After that I worked for Hosny as a RA on the “Women’s Liberation as a Financial Innovation” paper, and I became his co-author in “The Microfinance Disappointment: An Explanation Based on Risk Aversion” project. From this experience I learned several things that I consider the most important for my future research work. First, one should always think about the big picture and fundamental economic mechanisms, even if at glance the research idea seems to be related to a very specific situation. Second, I learned that a project can go in unpredicted directions, bringing a lot of new exciting economic insights, and researchers should not commit in advance not only to finding a particular answer to the initial question, but even to the question itself. Thinking about the big picture and accepting the new ideas that we discover working on a paper, makes the academic research in economics a true adventure, rather than a technical exercise. 

Currently I am a 4th year PhD Candidate at Boston College, Economics Department.

Date: 08/01/2019

Class: MAE'14