My Academic Journey

I present here one simple trick that makes your estimation coding much much nicer and faster. I have been using it before, but not with the current laptop. Thus, I just checked how to obtain it. What does this magical code do? It creates a nice table of your estimation resultS. This enables you to check many regressions at once. Additionally, the table looks good and it uses the variable names you have in STATA. First you need the packet. Just type  ssc install estout, replace  on stata command window.  Then, when coding, you tell STATA that you want to keep the results by adding eststo:  in front of your regression. Here is an example with a loop.  foreach var in  spill1 spill2 spill3{ eststo: xtgls dlny $explanatory `var', fe } esttab using "$caritaoutput\output.rtf", replace ( note that  $explanatory gives me variables saved there by global command. It is used like this: global explanatory var1 var2 var3 var4 ...

Today we had the honor of having Erkki Liikanen , the governor of Bank of Finland, at the University of Vaasa. He held an open lecture about the financial markets. The graph shows the steady state economic growth rates with dots and the actual growth with the red line. Between them we can see a blue area - the lost opportunities.  Macroprudential policy and financial union in context.  The financial crises widened our understanding of banks' excessive short-term funding and underestimation of the risks - especially systematic risks. Further, Liikanen noted that the banks haven't yet returned to the same profitability that they had before the financial crises. At the same time banks meet new competition .

Have you thought about starting doctoral studies but deadlines for next autumn already passed?  Good news: there is still time to apply in Finland! The deadline for doctoral students is 29 April  ( 31 October 2016  - although the previous link confusingly says 15th of November) in the university of Vaasa. Note: the exact deadline this year is 29.4.2016 even though the other link says 30. April. Here you can find more info regarding the intake. It is also noteworthy that there are other ways to fulfill the language requirement than the test only, see for more: admission The most important part of your application is the connection to the prospective supervisor and your research plan. The researchers are divided into research groups that you can find here . I am part of Intangible Capital Research Group , but we research also macro/financial stability, time series, environmental economics and how people understand economic facts.  But like other universities, ...

The Monday started with the third class of Writing better academic English . My biggest gain was that I can also draw. The upper picture is a visualization of the spillover effect that my dissertation is about. In the middle, you can see the home country (our point of view). We export a product that a trading partner uses in production. In that process, we can learn about their practices (organizational capital) for example. This is the export organizational capital spillover. We can also obtain a spillover effect from imported intermediate products. Importing a middle product is similar than exporting in terms of learning but we learn directly from their catalogs or the technology used in our ordered products (R&D spillover). However, patents protect the newest technology and thus the spillover cannot be strong for recent innovations. In the class, we went through some wordiness and academic writing style. The conversation took different tracks: How to refer age objectively...

In Finland, you need to pass entrance examination before you can start studying at an university. Then you will obtain a study place either for bachelor degree or for both bachelor and masters degrees. There are, however, some exceptions. If your math grades are good, you may get a study place in mathematics or if you get enough points from your matriculation examination, you might get a study place from technology without an extra exam.  In business studies, you need to take the entrance examination. The nice part is, that in some universities - like the university of Vaasa - the first year students choose their major subject in the late spring. Thus, the students have more time to think what really interests them. This week, the departments were "recruiting" students: Telling them why to choose subject X. Our supervisor, prof Piekkola, having a speech This year, marketing had copied our idea of legendary Pre-Christmas party, which offers discussion topics ye...