March 1 - March 8, 2025 | Happiness: 8/10, Productivity: 7/10.
Embedded Files
The art I did this week, "It's all good man!" Yeah, just finished Better Call Saul. Still, team Breaking Bad!
Me, sweet sweet Jinyang, our newly placed assistant professor Navid, Rajiv and his family (sleeping Koko!), and Mahdi!
From Eeshani's birthday!
Saturday: As usual, I went to Needmore Coffee and worked on our working paper with Alex and Mike. We need new data from LinkedIn to test one of our hypotheses. I came up with the initial result and e-mailed them.
I hosted a dinner party with finance PhD pals that night!
Sunday: I worked on a matching algorithm, and tried to use ChatGPT to help me to improve accuracy.
Monday: I cleaned Pitchbook data to create the private equity data set. I had a short meeting with Alex and Mike to get feedback on the initial results.
Tuesday: I cleaned Pitchbook data to create venture capital and M&A data sets.
Banking seminar lecture about banking regulation
Joined external speaker seminar, Simona Abis - "Breaking the Data Chain: The Ripple Effect of Data Sharing Restrictions on Financial Markets." I think the implications of big tech market power and monopolization of data on startups are vital. They did not focus on this side, but the tension between easy access to information vs. big data/computer power necessities in terms of startup innovativeness is fascinating.
I watched "Nosferatu synced with Radiohead (1922)" movie in IU Cinema with Wilson. So far, this is the oldest movie I have ever watched.
Wednesday: I continue to work on the name-matching algorithm.
Web scraping class with a focus on ChatGPT API usage.
I worked on my second-year paper data part.
We celebrated Eeshani's birthday with friends by making our own pizza!
Thursday: We had a long meeting with Noah about the name-matching algorithm I have been working on.
Banking seminar class, banking regulation.
I got feedback from Dr. K (Donald Kuratko who is Executive Director of the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the Kelley School of Business of Indiana University ) for my second-year paper. It was nice to talk with someone close to the industry. I read 5 papers from entrepreneurship literature before our meeting assigned by him.
I ran 3 miles, and we planned the Mexico City and Cancun trip with friends! Airbnb, flights, travel plan, diving arrangements!
Friday: I presented the PE data sample I created on Monday to Andrew. We discussed some ideas, I will work on a specific data summary from this data set.
Joined Winston Dou's "Fund Flows and Income Risk of Fund Managers" external speaker, and had lunch with him. It was super inspiring and beneficial in terms of coming back to my summer paper.
Three hours Therotical Corporate Finance class.
I did 1 hour 20 minutes of strength training with Wilson, watched El Camino: Breaking Bad Movie, and worked on a matching algorithm in the evening.
October 2 - November 25 | Long time, no see!
I decided to separate my research Journal and Journal, I will try to update my Research Journal whenever I learn something it might be useful in the future as well. For this part, in which I share new stuff from my personal life (like trying top rope climbing!), I'll try to update it every Sunday.
This page helps me to remember I am living the life high school version of myself dreamed of. So, I can see how far I have come.
I celebrated real Halloween the first time in the U.S.! In my first year, I was too worried about my microeconomics exam which I got an A later... However, this year, I was even part of the decoration & planning & cleaning part of one of the Halloween parties in town!! On Thursday, 31st of October, we went to Cowboy a themed Halloween party, and then on Friday, we decorated Racquel's place with Eli and Ege! On Saturday, we partied hard! Feeling a sense of belonging was the best part of that party.
We celebrated Diwali in Kelley! I finally started to like Indian cuisine. Dancing, good food, good company...
The same week, we celebrated the 101st year of the Turkish Republic! My friend Ege was from Izmir, but we ended up sitting at Adana's (my hometown) table! Again, dancing and good food... I felt so grateful to have many things to celebrate with my friends.
I tried hatha yoga for the first time with my Polish friend Dominika. I do not feel like I am exercising while doing yoga, but still, once a month, it might be a good practice (assuming I did some swimming or running before :)
I started swimming in August, I cannot believe how far I come. Of course, that day I was at my highest (had the perfect pre-meal and everything), but still I am very happy with my swimming progress.
I am still regularly visiting Needmore coffee shop! But, I need to come back to have one thing I do regularly. Back then it was reading Mostly Harmless Econometrics. It might be it again, or working for my solo 2nd year paper!
I love you cream cornet.
You cannot believe how many people are playing tennis in B-town! I am in several group chats for playing tennis. Unfortunately, only Eli is playing better than me. So, he is the most fun to play Tennis with so far.
Whenever I have doughnuts for breakfast I get the following feeling "God bless America!"
I put my new pr in 10k/km!!! And, I was not even feeling like running when I went to this run...
My other tennis buddy is from Wisconsin, and he brought some locally produced beers! Still, sitting on my fridge and waiting for good burgers to drink with it!
Samira got me some flowers since I looked like them to her...
In Turkey, our local alcoholic drink is "Rakı," consumed with fish and different mezes (small plates, to put on bread). From our Turkish rakı night! I still cannot drink Rakı since it is pretty heavy... So, sweet wine for me!
Yong Seok had this cool camare to take pictures! Me, drinking coffee in B-town. Enjoying my PhD in finance :)
Racquel, Eli, and me; decorating for Halloween!
Our corn-bread made by Midwesterner Francis!
We went top rope climbing with Yong Seok and Zeing! Zeing had a guest pass for us, and while Yong Seok was visiting town, I learned top rope climbing with him.
It's gonna be alright.
I tried bouldering first time in Eigenmann Hall with Ege, Haici, and Thomson! That gives me the motivation to try top rope climbing.
I took Yong Seok to the Dunnkirk Library to celebrate his birthday. It turns out cocktail bars are much more fun with close friends than dates!
Me singing Turkish song in International Student karaoke night. Yeah, anxiety is afraid of me!
September 24 - October 2
Since our first idea failed because of data-related issues, we met and discussed other ideas with the econ guys. Then, I went to the office to get feedback on our new idea. However, after the third question from our professor, I realized that is not going to work... We continued to discuss ideas during office hours, and we might find THE IDEA!! Stay tuned for preliminary data work (fingers crossed this one will work!)
On my way to Needmore, I read Merger Guidelines 5th time!
Sometimes, when I look at our Matlab code, Overleaf or Wenyu mentions the part I wrote in the code in our meetings, I cannot believe I did those...
I met with Noah three times between these dates to discuss our research question, how to narrow it down, and which empirical setting we can use to answer it. I compared our IPO data with Ritter's; I am very comfortable now using CRSP data with SQL, which makes me so happy. We both tried to write down mock introductions and again agreed that thinking about how to measure what we want to measure is such a headache! We still came up with something new; I will test it before our next meeting.
I got feedback from Andrew and Matt on my solo summer paper. I was so close to killing the idea- still, I am, but as a last shot, I will try to think about the empirical setting we discussed with Matt. I think killing this project will be difficult, even though the topic is outside of my research agenda; I loved it and spent so much time reading about it...
I joined Song Ma's external speaker seminar. Because of his Killer Acquisitions and CVC paper, I am a huge fan of his work. It was great to be in that seminar!
My Matlab skills and understanding of structural estimation are improving thanks to our weekly meetings with Wenyu! There are so many details to learn, and I think I am working with the right person to learn them!
I set up ChatGPT API for our patent project. It was extremely easy, and I could only spend 1 cent even though I tried many prompts.
I will discuss the KPSS 2017 paper in my seminar course this week! Innovation, M&As, and economics of anti-trust regulations seem to be my main research interests these days!
I am doing preliminary data work again using LinkedIn universal data. I will present this idea tomorrow in my seminar class. We need to present five ideas before the semester ends.
Sports Summary: 45 mins core workout, 30 mins pilates, 4700m swimming, 5k run (6 days active out of 9).
Having my lunch on my way to one class to another class because I spent the break talking about the research idea with my professor.
Another day of seeing my research topic on the first page of WSJ!
Getting my first swimmer's high after 1500m!!!
September 13 - September 23
After submitting my summer papers on Sunday, I went to Hopscotch Coffee on Monday afternoon after seeing their fresh fig roll on their IG page. It was a 30-minute walk from the office, and while ordering my coffee, our doctoral program director Alessandro came with other faculty... "You supposed to be working?" I showed him my giant backpack... "I came to work!" He was kind enough to pay for both my coffee and dessert, as well as for other visiting faculty... So, I worked almost 2 hours without blinking an eye because my professors were there :)
First time played golf in Holden Conference.
This week, Saturday morning, as usual, I'm having a pour-over with the darkest roast possible and had my Cream Cornetto in Needmore. While checking results from HPC... After this, I tried to write down our research question on white paper for almost 2 hours. Also, I had a 15-minute chat with Ali Kaan from the ODT department and a 5-minute chat with Ambarrish from computer science.
On Saturday, after the conference with the Econ guys. We are discussing possible research ideas for our Advanced IO course.
It is hard to track everything separately when you are a busy PhD student, as I tried to do below. So, I will follow Otenen (2022)\footnote{My PhD student friend from Cognitive Science and Informatics} and write my journal weekly.
Last week, we had the Holden Conference at IU. Conferences are good indicators for me to see how things changed over time. I remember I barely understood half of the papers last year and was worried about my midterm exam that week. This year, even though I had a midterm exam on Sunday, I joined all the sessions; I walked with guests from their hotels to the conference... I had research projects to talk with them and get their feedback as a young PhD student... My understanding of papers was much better.
This week:
I submitted my summer papers and arranged meetings to get feedback from several faculty (Kristoph, Mike, Eitan) for one of them. I am happy that I did not do just a literature review. So I was able to get their feedback on my research. I will continue to get feedback next week.
I discussed the Forced Entrepreneurs paper in my finance seminar class given by Kristoph Kleiner :) We will discuss five papers before the semester ends, and I am very happy about it. It is really good practice for the future. It was not an easy task to prepare for a discussion.
I am learning how to write a corporate finance model by using structural estimation from Wenyu Wang. It is like a "one student-only seminar" course; we discuss and write models together; I do assignments, and he gives me feedback... That also means I am learning Matlab as a Python girl, and my optimization skills are sharpening when working with Bellman equations. I am excited about this project.
I worked on narrowing down the research question of my other summer paper and updated the code for our patent matching project with Mike.
Sports Summary: 10k run, 10k walk, 1 hr pilates, 3500m swimming (7 days active out of 10)
Papers I Read (in detail)
Papers I Read (in detail)
Papers I read for my classes, papers I read for fun, papers I read to discuss my professor, papers I read for literature review... Of course, I read the introduction & methodology of countless papers, but here are the ones I read in detail and try to replicate sometimes.
February 18, 2024
I presented Shyam-Sunder and Myers (1998, JFE) and Chirinko & Singha (2000, JFE) capital structure papers in my Theoretical Corporate Finance class a week ago. This course is, most of the time, my favorite course this semester (except the moment Noah-Stoffman- explains the core of empirical asset pricing papers and helps me to understand economic intuition and those statistical results.) I really admire our Corporate Finance lecture notes prepared by Wenyu -Wang-. Therefore, I tried to create lecture notes like him in my paper presentation instead of preparing slides. I shared my notes with my classmates before the class, making it easier for them to follow me.
Also, for my Empirical Asset Pricing paper, I read "Cochrane's Dog Did Not Bark: A Defense of Return Predictability" (2008, RFS) and Gibbons, Ross, and Shanken's "A Test of the Efficiency of a Given Portfolio"(Econometrica, 1989). It is impressive to learn how statistical results can be interpreted in terms of finance.
While reading Cochrane's paper, I learned about "The Campbell-Shiller decomposition," here we use Taylor expansion to make function simpler, while in my corporate finance class, Goldstein, Ju, and Leland's (2001) paper uses Taylor expansion to show economic intuition behind the closed form solution.
Research Presentations
Research Presentations
(Presentation from AFA 2024, Behavioral Asset Pricing session)
I always attend Kelley's research presentations if I do not have a class. From now on, I will share those under this title (Feb 3, 2024).
February 18, 2024
I have attended three different seminars/talks in the last two weeks.
Two of them were Research Brown Bag, and one of them was Teaching Brown Bag.
The first Brown Bag was a banking paper, I believe, synthesized with accounting. Presenting theory papers is always challenging for the presenter and the audience (if you are not clever enough!) Especially if you are expanding one of the old theories, which other people do not know anything about it. For example, in my Theoretical Corporate Finance class, our professor always mentioned, "Now literature starts from here," because someone had already done the basics. However, sometimes understanding those basics even takes more than an hour.
The other paper presented in the Brown Bag uses textual analysis (BERT). I also tried to analyze M&A announcements last semester. What I observe for these textual analysis papers:
The text we choose to analyze is really important. For example, in my case, M&A announcements did not provide much information to help you understand what is happening. Even when choosing a newspaper to analyze, WSJ, Bloomberg, and NYT have different stories. I believe we need a good reason to choose that text to analyze. Why not 10Ks, but analyst reports? Why Moody's? Why?
Nobody cares how we did the analysis. I read this advice in Cochrane's blog while he was giving advice to PhD students about writing. What is your accuracy level? What are your results?
Classification is a super important part of textual analysis, and we should consider it carefully before analyzing it.
Lastly, the first time I attended "Teaching Brown Bag," it was about how to "teach a case." Idie Kesner's methods, which are giving answer papers to students to put in front of them, were truly amazing. In my undergrad, I remember we used online platforms to say yes/no or choose options to decide something in the case. But first of all, it was anonymous. Secondly, we lost the first answer, which could be related to the second answer and create "friction." But if you provide option cards and yes/no signs to students to put them in their desks in the classroom (she showed them to us), the professor will know who said what, and let's say the student says "yes, it is a good industry," but then choose option A for a company which is "not enter" that industry advice. The professor can ask students "why" and help them understand what is illogical. I will try to attend one of her case-study classes with MBA students. Hopefully, I will share pictures of those cards with her permission.
General Updates & Notes
General Updates & Notes
February 18, 2024
This week's goal is to get writing feedback from Mike (Woeppel) for my mock introduction for our paper, continue to work on it, and learn how to do event study with deep understanding. My PhD fellow Yong Seok (Kim) suggested the following paper for event study:
"Event Studies in Economics and Finance" (Mackinlay, 1997, Journal of Economic Literature).
Feb 4, Sunday - 2024
Today, I went for a quick 7 km Sunday run, and while running I listened to "The Hidden Curriculum."
The episode I chose was:
"Your brain loves a good plan." is my favorite quote from the episode. I also checked Patrick's website. I was trying to read Atomic Habits, but I was a little bit bored, to be honest. "Make Time" is my next stop.
Then, I went to Sebastian's website and found data-is-plural.com, which provides an interesting database newsletter!
Feb 3, Saturday - 2024
One of the biggest updates from last semester, my first year in Ph.D., I presented my research idea in my Ph.D. Brown Bag. The idea itself is already dead. But, the other time, I will tell my research idea the most on the 3rd slide of my presentation :) I was so into sharing my motivation, so at the end of the 5th slide, I was still pitching my motivation but did not mention the research question... I hope to keep my enthusiasm to share and get feedback for my research, though, since excitement is the most powerful side of my presentation!
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