|
Senior Honor's Thesis Seminar University of California, Berkeley Fall 2003 Professor Martha Olney |
Interview with Prof. Maurice Obstfeld
Interview conducted by Peter Stosich
Professor Obstfeld specializes in international macroeconomics, and has written quite a few research papers on that subject. His current projects are on the Japanese economy and international macro models. He just finished co-authoring his third book on the history of international capital markets, which is the result of seven years of work.
When asked how he finds specific topics to research, Prof. Obstfeld replied that he has no particular way of arriving at specific topics. He never purposefully seeks topics, but instead reads about various issues and studies other professors’ papers and tries to keep an open mind.
He does use econometrics in his studies and often finds data online, but he warned that online data must be checked for accuracy. For historical data that is not available online, he said that the Berkeley libraries are excellent sources. He and his colleagues typically use STATA and RATS (Regression Analysis for Time Series) in creating their econometric models.
Professor Obstfeld is not teaching this semester because he is on sabbatical. He attended UPenn for undergrad and went to MIT for graduate school.
Interview with Prof. Maurice Obstfeld
Interview conducted by Suh Kang
I had a chance to interview Professor Maurice Obstfeld. It was exciting to interview the author of International Economics: Theory and Policy, which was the textbook I used for Economics 182. Professor Obstfeld is the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics and is mainly interested in International Finance and Macroeconomics, in which he has published quite a few research articles.
Professor Obstfeld’s current research interests lie in currency crises, international capital market integration (causes of integration and disintegration, the benefits of integration), monetary policy, and the role of exchange rates. The common questions he asks when doing research are:
He comes up with such questions through everyday reading, careful thinking,
and looking for connections among things. Given a question, he tries to think
of an economic model or empirical strategies before he looks into data. His
main sources of data are the International Monetary Funds, the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Department of Commerce, old
newspapers and journals, publications from the United Nations, and the global
financial data available from the Econometrics Laboratory or the library
home page.