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Federica Daniele '13 wins Job Market Best Paper Award from Unicredit & Universities
Federica Daniele is one of two winners of the 2017 Unicredit & Universities Job Market Best Paper Award for her paper, "The Implications of Declining Firm-Level Uncertainty for Consumption Variety and Cities." Daniele is a graduate of the BSE Master Program in Economics (Class of 2013) and a PhD candidate at GPEFM (UPF and BSE). The award was announced at this year's Symposium of the Spanish Economic Association (SAEe), hosted by the BSE at Ciutadella Campus (UPF), Ms. Daniele's home institution.
Unicredit & Universities gives the best paper award to outstanding PhD candidates or graduates who are enrolled at one of the following institutions: Barcelona School of Economics; Bocconi University; London School of Economics and Political Science; Mannheim University; Oxford University; SciencesPo; Stockholm School of Economics; or Toulouse School of Economics.
"I was very excited to receive the good news," Ms. Daniele said. "The academic environment is extremely competitive: receiving an official acknowledgment of your work during the PhD, such as publishing a paper, or being awarded a prize, is an extremely valuable way to signal your quality as a researcher. I was also very glad to discover that I was one of two women being awarded the prize, the first time since its establishment that this prize got awarded to a female researcher," Ms. Daniele said.
Reputation, personality, and collaborative spirit
This is the second year in a row that a graduate of the BSE Master's in Economics has been awarded the Best Paper Award. One of last year's recipients, Greg Ganics, was also a BSE alumnus and earned his PhD in the GPEFM program, organized jointly by UPF and BSE.
Ms. Daniele said that the great reputation of Pompeu in macroeconomics and the number of very interesting research personalities working in other fields were the factors that convinced her to first do a Master's degree at the BSE and later continue her doctoral studies at the UPF.
"I have received incredible support from the faculty and staff of BSE and the GPEFM program, and benefited from invaluable discussions with my supervisors, Giacomo Ponzetto and Jan Eeckhout, but also with Edouard Schaal and Julian di Giovanni, among many others," Ms. Daniele said. "I also enjoyed the financial support of the La Caixa-Severo Ochoa doctoral fellowship, which allowed me to spend a semester abroad in the vibrant research community at UC Berkeley. Most importantly, I feel blessed for the countless enriching conversations I had with my fellow PhD students: the size and diversity of backgrounds in the doctoral program is one of the strength points of doing a PhD in Pompeu, along with a tradition of people speaking out their mind with a constructive and cooperative spirit," she said.
What do changing firm dynamics mean for consumers?
Ms. Daniele's paper assesses the novel long-run consequences on economic activity of declining firm-level uncertainty from both empirical and theoretical perspectives.
"There is something alarming about the direction in which firm dynamics have been changing over the course of the last decades. Today it’s much rarer to encounter firms that undergo large up/downsizings than it used to be in the past: in other words, firms have become more tied to their rank in the firm size distribution," Ms. Daniele explains. "This has been of concern for many economists, who see this happening jointly with a slowdown in aggregate productivity growth and competitiveness. Being aware that the question on the drivers behind this trend and its consequences was still open to debate, coupled with an interest for entrepreneurship, is what pushed me to dive into this topic to better our understanding of the issue."
Ms. Daniele shares a summary of her paper and some advice for aspiring PhD students in a post on the BSE Voice.
See also
Unicredit & Universities Job Market Best Paper Award goes to Greg Ganics (Economics '12 and GPEFM)