I had the opportunity to interview Professor Guido Imbens about his areas of interest in research and how he went about handling his research. Professor Imbens specializes in econometrics.

He asserts that he does not have to think very hard to come up with his research topics. Many queries arise spontaneously in the course of his current research efforts and he merely has to examine each of them to have a whole assortment of interesting topics ready to be looked into. Due to the highly theoretical nature of his research, Professor Imbens spends a lot of this time in his office “thinking hard” about his work. His cerebral acrobatics are practically sufficient to drive his studies without him having to conduct surveys or mine data sources like other economics professors tend to do.

Professor Imbens prefers to work on various papers and projects concurrently at any one time. When he gets stuck on any one paper, he would take time off it and work on another project while he devises different approaches to unravel the problem. In this manner, he has been able to leapfrog “writer’s block” to be very productive.

Professor Imbens has worked with many graduate and undergraduate students during his previous stint at Harvard University. He therefore has many interesting examples to share concerning how he and his previous students had designed innovative ways together to find and examine data to analyze economic patterns. An example is a student who wants to investigate how an increase in affluence affects people who have been poor all their life. After much brainstorming, he and his students then thought of looking at a sample of lottery winners and how they reacted to sudden increase in wealth. This creative way of looking at data oftentimes yields interesting and original results. He recommends students to think of novel ways to look at data instead of manipulating it in a run-of-the-mill manner.