In Their Words: Mai Hakamada

Name: Mai Hakamada

Department: Economics

What Award/ Scholarship did you receive? Eileen Brooks Memorial Award

What year are you (1st year, 3rd year)? 3rd Year, Ph.D Candidate. 

College: Graduate Division

Where do you call home? Japan

With all of the choices for college, what made UC Santa Cruz stand out? I came to UC Santa Cruz since I felt the economics department has a great environment to study monetary policy.

What is your field of focus? Monetary Economics, Macro-Finance, and Macroeconomics.

What is one memorable moment that stands out for you as a student here? If I were asked what memorable moment stands out for me as a student in UC Santa Cruz, I would choose all the moments after I figured out my research interests - thinking about model overnight, discussing with advisor, professors, and cohorts, getting feedbacks from seminar speakers, and presenting in workshops. I enjoyed all of these moments, and likewise, they helped me to realize that I really like working on research.

How will this scholarship impact your academic life /research? This award means a lot to me, and it is a key motivator in pursuing my goal. Before this, I did not have any confidence about my research ability. However, the experience of receiving this Eileen Brooks Memorial award encourages me to keep motivating myself for my research so I could try pursuing academia or policy-related career after graduation.

For research awards, please include a one paragraph description of your research written for a general audience. My current research project of “Monetary Policy and Bank Risk-Taking” studies the optimal monetary policy when there is an endogenous mechanism, which connects the nominal interest rate and bank’s risk choice on their asset side of balance sheets. Several empirical studies presented that banks “search for yield” when the low nominal interest rate compresses their margin. I constructed a model, which describes this mechanism, so I can analyze the optimal monetary policy that central banks should take under this environment.