THOMAS ASH

I am a Researcher at the Anderson School of Management, UCLA and an Economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast.

Research summary

I use machine learning methods (esp. NLP) and optimization models to study social media, finance, macroeconomics and climate change (with some side-work on migration and pandemics).

About me

Stoke's pottery industry declined: employing >100k (19th Century) --> 52.7k (1979) --> 10k (2010s). But more recently a revival -> (see link).

LSE twice (BSc, MSc Econ), NERA economic consulting, University of Birkbeck (MSc Maths, part-time), Oxford Economics, USC (PhD Econ). UCLA (current).

Speak French and Spanish passably, plus some Arabic and some Farsi (works in progress) 

-- "Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world." Rumi (in Farsi).

Masculine/feminine in language derive from indo-european languages' "animate"/"inanimate" -- endings for whether something is alive (people/animals/moving), or inert (objects/not moving). Over time animate became masc/fem (French, Spanish). Some languages retained inanimate (German neuter). Some lost all three (English/Farsi/Armenian).


There is substantial debate in linguistics about the critical period hypothesis -- that there is an ideal time window of brain development to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which further language acquisition becomes much more difficult and effortful -- for second language acquisition.

some PAPERS I LIKE


On the spatial impact of global warming (Rossi-Hansberg and Desmet) | 2017, Journal of Urban Economics, LINK

A macroeconomic model with a financial sector (Brunnermeier and Sannikov) | 2014, AER, LINK

Speculative fever: investor contagion in the housing bubble (Bayer, Mangum and Roberts) | 2021, AER, LINK 

Dynamic interpretation of emerging risks in the financial sector (Hanley and Hoberg) | 2019, Review of Financial Studies, LINK

Asset markets with heterogenous information (Kurlat) | 2016, Econometrica, LINK