Dear XXX,
I am sending you my master’s thesis.
I am very grateful to you for your time and help, and cwould it be possible to speak with you one more time, please,? mMainly about academia and PhD, probably, on the day of the master’s thesis defense or ion any other close day?
I would like to ask your advice about 3 issues:
• If I am not mistaken, publishing in the top journals is extremely difficult, but it is necessary to have such publications in order to fulfill tenure requirements. What strategy is better to choose in order to successfully enter on the job market after a PhD and to fulfill tenure requirements in the future? Is it better at the begginning of an academic career to seek the most promising ideas in many different topics (fields) or to concentrate only on one or two of the topics (fields), but in this case, probably, not all ideas will be the most promising?
• At this point I would like to ask your opinion about one possible field of research. I found that there are several publications in the top 3three journals in empirical asset pricing that uses text mining tools for the studying of the stock market, but I could not find any articles in a good journal that implements text mining for international finance. It confused me, because it seems to me that empirical asset pricing and international finance are similar fields in the opportunities for text mining. For example, there are at least two directions in international finance that can be realized using text mining:
o Using the content of media, we can estimate medium-run expectations of investors about particular countries and find the relationship between such expectations and capital flows in such countries, that may lead to changes in exchange rates, in the possibility of the carry trade and so on.
o Medium-run expectations of investors estimated from the analysis of domestic media can differ significantly from the similar expectations of foreign investor destermimatned from the analysis of fointerenatigonal media. The differences in the expectations may also determine capital flows between countries, which will also lead to changes in many macroeconomic phenomena.
Would you continue in my place to develop these ideas further? It seems to me that its canould be a whole unstudied sub-field of research, but I am afraid that I am wrong somewhere. It looks suspiciously good.
• CWould it be possible to ask for your help in the admission to some PhD programs in finance? I would like to ask you to write a recommendation for them. I hesitate about the list, but, it is probably, it is worth applying to the following PhD programs: SFI, INSEAD, Imperial College, LSE, LBS, British Columbia, Toronto, Maryland, Michigan, Yale, UCLA. I am afraid that I have mentioned some PhD programs of the level that exceeds my true level, if so, could you please correct me?
Yours sincerely,
XXX