What he wants to know: “I would like to integrate macroeconomic models into the finance asset-pricing literature. While we understand well how financial asset prices move relative to each other, we haven’t been able to clearly identify the fundamental economic factors driving the markets.” Underlying Betermier’s interest in the global economy is a desire to examine the impact of financial markets on social welfare and inequality. “At the end of the day,” he says, “what matters is that we understand not only how the markets work but also how they can be used to improve how we all live.”

Why Haas is the place to find out: “The intellectual rigor of the program. The faculty care a lot about ideas that are theoretically robust. This mind-set has a hugely beneficial impact on the quality of the students’ research. Whether we do theoretical or empirical work, it helps us to appreciate and develop strong and useful models.”