The first thing to know about the MFM Summer Camp is that it’s exhausting in the best possible way. From the moment you land in the airport and start meeting your fellow attendees to the final goodbye at the airport, you’re in contact with peers who share your research interests. You soon learn that any social setting, whether the breaks in between sessions or serendipitous meetings in the evenings, is fair game to discuss research. The sessions are great: you see leading researchers present their work as they try and draw you into their fields. Lars and Andrew are essential to the entire process; their humility, humor, and enthusiasm set the tone for the entire event. You realize that there’s an entire community of young researchers interested in the same questions as you, and equally eager to apply new insights and methods to answer those questions. You leave exhausted by a week of energetic, passionate discussion, yet simultaneously energized to return to research.
Geoffery Zheng, UCLA
The MFM summer camp was an extremely useful experience. Throughout the camp, we saw many presentations on frontier research in macroeconomics and finance. Even though the presentation times were short, which had the benefit of allowing us to see many presentations in one day, I had the opportunity to continue discussing my research with other attendees throughout the day. Learning about both the professors’ and students’ research was both fascinating and inspiring.
I plan to stay in touch with a number of the people I met during the MFM summer workshop. I expect we will continue to discuss our research, and there may even be opportunities to coauthor in the future. This workshop created an excellent network of students and professors with similar research interests and a broad range of skills and experiences that I’m optimistic will lead to new collaborative work and help us all do better and more innovative research.
Sasha Indarte, Northwestern University
The MFM Summer camp exposed me to topics and approaches in macro-finance to which I was not exposed during my PhD, and it helped me to refine my knowledge of topics with which I was familiar. This was true for both material presented by speakers and presentations and conversations I had with other campers. The opportunity to interact with both established and young economists working on macro-finance made the summer camp a great experience, which I totally recommend to other young scholars.
David Rappoport, Federal Reserve Board
My experience at the 2017 MFM summer camp will be a defining moment of my PhD. The ability to meet scholars PhD students, faculties, and professional economists interested in the broad issue of Macro-Finance was inspiring and valuable. The poster session and student presentations allowed one to obtain an overview of the current research trends and interests among the youngest scholars, and perhaps opens the road for future collaboration. Presentations by practitioners in the private sector and economists at the IMF, Treasury and Bank of England provided to participants new research ideas which, by construction, are relevant to the real world. Faculty presentations exposed us to modern styles and techniques of research. Finally, the inspiring speeches of Lars Hansen and Andrew Lo helped to justify some of the inevitable sacrifices encountered on the path of a PhD an invaluable resource.
Yann Koby, Princeton University
The MFM summer session at Bretton Woods was a truly unique experience in academic economics. A field that is often competitive and siloed, this conference brought together practitioners, students, and top scholars from macroeconomics and finance with specializations in both theoretical and empirical work. The event not only clearly communicated its goal of inducing collaboration between these groups, but also fostered an environment incredibly supportive of these goals. I would never have guessed I would find myself as a student talking over beers with a Nobel Laureate and an industry practitioner and feeling my opinions and ideas were valued and respected.
Daniel Green, MIT
