THOMAS ASH
I am a Researcher at the Anderson School of Management, UCLA and an Economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast.
Research summary
Computational linguistics.
Financial frictions.
Climate change.
Digital Economics.
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
Come from a small city in the UK called Stoke-On-Trent or the "Potteries".
Stoke's pottery industry declined: employing >100k (19th Century) --> 52.7k (1979) --> 10k (2010s). But more recently a revival -> (see link).
Lived in London for ten years. Los Angeles for five years.
LSE twice (BSc, MSc Econ), NERA economic consulting, University of Birkbeck (MSc Maths, part-time), Oxford Economics, USC (PhD Econ). UCLA (current).
Love languages.
Speak French and Spanish passably, plus some Arabic and some Farsi (works in progress)Â
-- "Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world." Rumi (in Farsi).
Some linguistics facts I like.
The origin of masculine/feminine in language is that all indo-european languages used to have "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.