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ATLANTA—Georgia State doctoral student Samir Elsadek Mahmoudi (Ph.D. in Economics) was recently named a Blackrock Applied Research Award finalist for his paper, “The Propagation of Local Credit Shocks: Evidence from Hurricane Katrina.”
The award, which is designed to foster financial innovation and connectivity between BlackRock, a global investment management corporation, and the academic community grants $25,000 to the top job market paper submitted by a Ph.D. candidate as decided by a committee of judges from BlackRock and faculty from prestigious universities that this year included Duke, Northwestern and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“The empirical rigor in Samir’s analysis contributes to our understanding of the effects of local climate and credit shocks on national housing and mortgage markets. It is one of two outstanding essays in his dissertation,” said professor Tom Mroz, the Bernard B. and Eugenia A. Ramsey Chair of Private Enterprise in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies and Mahmoudi’s doctoral supervisor. “The blinded selection process used by Blackrock to select the finalists ensures that the best empirical research in the world has a chance to be recognized.”
The other finalists were from Yale, the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago.
“I am deeply grateful to my dissertation chair, Thomas Mroz. His insightful comments were turning points in the lifecycle of this paper,” Mahmoudi said. “We translated ideas from our continuous discussions into multiple empirical tests. This investigative approach led us to a coherent empirical story that can compete at the top level in the US.”
Mahmoudi is an applied microeconomist whose research interests are at the intersection of financial and public economics. He is an NBER pre-doctoral fellow on the Economics of an Aging Workforce and has held an internship with the International Monetary Fund. His has recently been presented and will be presented at top economics, finance and real estate conferences including the meeting of the International Banking, Economics and Finance Association (IBEFA/ASSA), the Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, and the Conference of the ZEW Network on Real Estate and Capital Markets.
“This recognition would not have been possible without the extensive economic expertise GSU has to offer. I have to thank multiple faculty members for their constructive comments and encouragement, especially Stephen Shore, Jonathan Smith, David Sjoquist, Vikas Agarwal, Scott Murray, Pierre Nguimkeu and my external adviser Kris Gerardi,” Mahmoudi said.
“I believe each institution has a spirit. At AYS, empirical rigor is the main educational message, and it worked out very well for me.”