Contents
How a PhD in Brussels is taught, why the economy is inexhaustible for research ideas and what can help bosses in managing employees if you approach the issue from a scientific point of view
About the expert: Sergey Stepanov is an assistant professor at ICEF. In October 2020, his paper on why leaders benefit from biased performance evaluations was accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
Interview provided by the International Institute of Economics and Finance.
From engineers to economists
In the late 1990s, I graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute and did not know what to do next, since technical education at that time did not give good career prospects. Somehow by chance I found out about NES, it was a completely new story for Russian education and science. I realized this only later, and then I just heard that it was interesting to study there, but after graduation you can find an exciting and well-paid job. What is economics as a science, I then did not imagine at all. But little by little she became interested in me, and after some hesitation, I decided to leave for a PhD.
Since I was not a top student, the popular American universities were not available to me. So I decided to move to Europe. As a result, I got to the Free University of Brussels (Université Libre de Bruxelles) for the PhD program ECARES (European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics, European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics).
Study in Brussels
ECARES is a relatively small but strong research center. It was founded in 1991 by MIT and Harvard graduates Matthias Devatrypon and Philip Weil. Matthias was my supervisor and his supervisor was the 2007 Nobel laureate Eric Maskin.
The years in Brussels are one of the favorite periods of my life. I immersed myself in European culture for five years, found new friends and, by the way, a wife who recklessly agreed to later move to Moscow with me. Brussels is such a mini-London, a very cosmopolitan city that mixes many cultures. I plunged into all this and, it seems to me, became a different, freer person. Perhaps this is more important than getting a PhD.
For freedom to the labor market
The attraction of an academic career for me lies in the freedom. You can do what you like and what makes sense. I ask questions and answer them myself. Of course, this is a certain challenge, it is difficult to be your own master – you need to be able to motivate yourself even when it seems that you are at an impasse and nothing will work out.
In the fall of 2004, I entered the international labor market for “academicians” – I began to apply to various universities. Back then, all the papers had to be sent by mail in analog form, and I went there and sent large envelopes with my job market paper and CV. After that, as usual, in early January, I went to the USA for a big conference, where I was interviewed by various universities. I had about ten interviews, which resulted in about 5 flyouts (invitations to speak with a seminar. — Trends). As a result, there were two job offers: at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and in Moscow, at NES. I chose the latter. After working there for seven years, I moved to HSE.
Economics as an eternal scientific quest
In mathematics, a scientist, as a rule, has a range of unsolved, but already set problems. For example, to prove Fermat’s theorem. There is no such “short list” in the economy, where you need to come up with a research question yourself – this is both the most interesting and the most difficult. You look around and ask questions: Why is that? How can one explain this or that behavior of people? Why, for example, do people in Moscow not wear masks on the subway (but they do in New York), or make suboptimal decisions in the financial markets? Why do people listen to populists, while governments make deliberately inefficient decisions? You seek to understand the cause of such phenomena, to come up with an explanation. This is exploratory thinking. True, this is not enough, since one must also be able to formalize one’s thoughts (at least for a theoretical economist) with the help of mathematical models.
New article
My article, accepted for publication in the JEBO (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization) in the fall of 2020, is devoted to how to optimally evaluate work and make decisions about the future economic agent concerned with career incentives. It is called Biased Performance Evaluation in A Model of Career Concerns: Incentives versus Ex-Post Optimality, the preprint was published back in 2015, and I started developing the topic itself about seven years ago.
Employees of firms, managers, civil servants, researchers at the university are periodically evaluated by their activities, on which their future fate depends. It turns out that in the general case it is optimal for the boss to create a biased evaluation scheme, and the optimal “bias” can be both against and in favor of the agent.
The fact is that such a bias, being suboptimal, can subsequently stimulate the agent to work towards achieving a result. For example, people who seem to us a priori talented should be judged harshly, and those who initially do not impress should be judged softly, and this “bias” should grow with the strength of the agent’s career incentives. People, on the other hand, regarding whose talent there is a large initial uncertainty, should not be judged biased.
Beyond Science
I’m into running. I run all distances from 5 to 42,2 km, but I want to try an ultramarathon (anything over 42,2 km) or some mountain trail soon. I also like to read historical books at night. By the way, ideas for research are often drawn from them.
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