Graduate Student Work

The Center benefits from the contributions of student interns both during the academic year and over the summer. Short descriptions of past graduate student work are available below.

• Toré Amanzholov (MFin ’17) joined GCFP in the summer of 2016 and worked on projects related to regulation and sovereign defaults. Toré conducted preliminary research into hot topics in financial regulation and co-authored a blog post on the U.S. government’s response to Puerto Rico’s 2016 default.
• Essi Haffar researched developments in financial reporting standards over the last 20 years that have had an effect on infrastructure finance. Essi, a GCFP intern and Harvard Kennedy School student, gave particular attention to GASB Statement 34, which was intended to make the costs of deferred infrastructure maintenance more transparent. Read her report here.
• Kijung Hwang (MBA ’18) spent the summer of 2017 surveying the global landscape of reverse mortgage programs. Kijung researched the history and current status of reverse mortgage programs around the world and conducted preliminary analysis on the role of government guarantees for such programs.
• Chris Lange (MBA ’18) spearheaded an initiative at GCFP to create an interactive educational tool for researchers, practitioners, and the general public to learn more about financial regulatory reform and stay abreast of legislative developments. Through the BRiC tool, one can find relevant articles, research papers, speeches, bills, blogs, videos and more compiled from a wide range of reputable sources, each linked to its original source.
• Jonathan Lin (MFin ’19) conducted a thorough literature review on the topic of common ownership in the summer of 2018. As passive investing has become increasingly popular in recent decades, scholars have debated the competitiveness implications of common ownership, whereby shareholders own significant stakes in multiple firms within an industry. Jonathan identified and synthesized the extant literature to facilitate future work on the topic by GCFP. Read the review here.
• Luis Enrique Vivas Martinez (MFin ’19) joined GCFP as a research assistant intern for the summer of 2018. Luis supported ongoing research on infrastructure finance and was a principal contributor to the Center’s educational tool on housing finance reform.
• Giorgio Zheng (MFin ’19) joined the Center in the summer of 2018 to contribute to an evaluation of the Small Business Administration’s Microloan program. Giorgio has written a background paper on microloans in the United States and is currently working with SBA data to evaluate key questions of program performance.