For prospective PhD students
Draft. Malcolm should sharpen the claims about his own working style; the rest is drawn from the public record of what he works on.
What I work on
Corporate finance, banking and financial institutions, labor and finance, and text analytics. In practice most of my papers fall into one of four groups:
- Labor and finance. How financial constraints and ownership changes affect workers, particularly workplace safety. Two Journal of Finance papers and one Review of Financial Studies paper sit here.
- Financial history. The Freedman’s Savings Bank work, which is as much an exercise in building a dataset from archival records as it is an empirical finance paper.
- Contract design. Loan agreements and corporate bonds: what gets written down, what gets standardized, and what gets left out.
- Method. Papers about how to do empirical work correctly, most visibly the count data paper and the cross-sectional event study paper.
If you are interested in one of those, we will have things to talk about. If you are interested in asset pricing, I am not your advisor, and saying so early saves us both time.
What I look for
Comfort with data that does not want to be used. A meaningful share of my work involves records that arrive as scanned images, ragged text, or filings that were never meant to be parsed. Students who are willing to spend a month building a clean dataset, and who find that interesting rather than merely necessary, do well with me.
Willingness to be wrong in public. The most useful thing that happens in a research meeting is one of us discovering that an idea does not work. If your instinct is to defend a result rather than attack it, that is a habit worth unlearning early.
Programming ability, or the willingness to acquire it. You do not need to arrive fluent. You do need to be someone who will become fluent. See the Stata notes for the register I work in, and the software page for the sort of tooling that ends up being necessary.
Before you email
Read one of my papers first, and say something specific about it. “I am interested in your research” is indistinguishable from a form letter, because it usually is one. A single concrete sentence about a paper puts you ahead of most of the inbox.
I cannot admit you on my own. Admissions are a departmental decision, so a warm email from me is encouraging but not dispositive. Apply through the Terry College PhD program regardless.