From Banking to PHD: Lakshita's Journey in Economic Research
Akshit Bhati, December 17, 2022
Lakshita Jain is an international student from Delhi, India. She came to study at UNC for her MS in Economics from 2017-2021, and she originally had done her MA in Economics at the Delhi School of Economics. After her time studying for her master’s, she began a career in banking at ICI where she really enjoyed the financial aspect. However, something still seemed to be lacking to Lakshita.
Lakshita soon came back to UNC where she began her endeavors in the research world when she started her PhD. Specifically, Lakshita was interested in the work that Dr. Anusha Chari had done. The aspects of working on Macroeconomic issues, along with the exposure to cross-country finance really intrigued her. During her time back at UNC, she took one of Dr. Chari’s classes called Open Economy Macroeconomics, and she absolutely fell in love.
Following that passion, she soon became an assistant working alongside Dr. Chari. To understand the context of her paper, the topic revolved around the banking sector crisis in India in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. Specifically, it looked at the credit allocation efficiency of banks that were owned by the government relative to privately owned banks.
The paper found that government-owned banks lent significantly more loans to low-quality borrowers leading to negative externalities in credit access for healthy firms in the economy. These low-quality firms as a result expanded more relative to healthier firms, reflecting an inefficient allocation of credit. The results of this paper then became featured in the Economic Survey of India.
Lakshita was drawn to this area because she was interested in failing corporations. Having worked in a bank before, it was fascinating for her to hear these stories and now study them first-hand. The Indian economy at that time was doing especially well since the late 90s and into the 2000s. However, ever since 2010 with a slowdown in credit creation, the public sector banks began to perform poorly.
One of Lakshita’s favorite memories throughout this research project was deciding a question and then going about exploring it. With generating the question, it was exciting for Lakshita to contemplate the possibilities of what could be explored. Additionally, utilizing data sets then offered the possibility to see these questions visually.
Lakshita’s journey into the economic sphere was quite amazing. For any students that are interested in exploring various questions, she suggests that one should seek out a higher degree such as a PHD to be able to do research into a topic of their passion. Additionally, one thing that she highly recommends is to not be afraid to experiment.
Lakshita believes that there is so much time to explore your passion, and one should not get themselves tied down too easily or feel the need to know it right away. Lastly, Lakshita emphasizes that having the correct advisor who has your back is imperative. Lakshita would like to finish off by saying many thanks to Dr. Chari for getting her on board and guiding her throughout her journey.
If you are interested in learning more about Lakshita’s work, check out these links: https://sites.google.com/view/lakshita-jain/research?pli=1
Lakshita Jain is now working at META in Seattle as a Data Scientist.