Curriculum Vitae – Michael P Curran Contact Information Education k [email protected] m michael-curran.com H +353-87-127-5975 October 11, 2014 dob: 11-May-1986 Citizenship: Ireland 2011 – Trinity College Dublin, Ireland PhD Candidate in Economics (Supervisor: Prof Philip Lane) ‘Understanding Uncertainty, Volatility & Macroeconomic Performance’ 2014 University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A. (Jan–Aug) Visiting PhD Student (Jesús Fernández-Villaverde & Enrique Mendoza) 2010 – 2011 Northwestern University, U.S.A. MA in Economics 2008 – 2009 Cambridge University, U.K. MPhil in Economics (Supervisor: Prof Andrew Harvey) ‘A Stochastic Model of Current Account Dynamics’ 2004 – 2008 Trinity College Dublin, Ireland First Place B.A. Maths & Economics (Double First Class Honours) & Gold Medal Exam Results: First Class (I) every year Research Fields Primary: International Financial Macroeconomics, Uncertainty Secondary: New Macroeconometrics, Computational Economics, Econometrics Academic Achievements 2014 Young Scientist at 5th Lindau Nobel Meetings (Economics) – one of 450 from 20,000 nationally and internationally selected 2014 Irish Lindau Nobel Meeting Award 2014 2012 IRC Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship 2010 University Fellowship Northwestern University for Economics PhD 2009 Economics Gold Medal from Irish President at Undergraduate Awards of Ireland inaugural ceremony (Presidential National Level Award) 2008 Robert Gardiner Memorial Scholarship, Cambridge European Trust & Department of Economics Bursary, Cambridge University 2008 Dublin Univ Gold Medal placing first in finals with exceptional marks 2006 Foundation Scholar of Dublin University (five years free fees, room & board) placing first in my course and faculty in 2nd year exams 2005 Dermot McAleese Economics Prize Professional Affiliations American Economic Association, European Economic Association, Royal Economic Society, Econometric Society Research Experience 2011 → 2012 Research Assistant, Prof Philip Lane, Econ Dept, TCD 2009 → 2010 Research Assistant, Prof Philip Lane, Econ Dept, TCD 2006 → 2008 Research Assistant, Prof Antoin Murphy, Econ Dept, TCD 2008 Summer Research Intern, Macroeconomic Analysis, ESRI Ireland Ireland’s leading economic & social policy research institute 2006 June → August Consultant Researcher, Irish Hospice Foundation: Irish Financial Services & Construction sectors 2005 August → September Research Intern, Dolmen Stockbrokers Job Market Paper ‘Interest Rate Volatility & Macroeconomic Dynamics’ This paper contributes to the empirical literature and the theoretical, quantitative modelling literature on international financial macroeconomics, in addition to developing computational methods of practical benefit for applied macroeconomists. I document new stylised facts on the relation between real interest rate volatility and macroeconomic variables for a panel of 27 countries including emerging markets and peripheral and core euro area economies using data up to 2013.02. Empirically, the key new result is that volatility leads the cycle by about 15 months, which is significantly longer than the four month lead previously estimated for pre-crisis Latin America. This holds once a broad range of economies are taken into account over an extended time period and arises from considering correlations at various lag lengths. Many other findings are consistent with earlier work on four Latin American economies before the financial crisis. Theoretically, I show that the facts can be reproduced from a quantitative DSGE model augmented with stochastic volatility shocks. The central mechanism is precautionary savings. The economy contracts following volatility shocks with a delay as evidenced in the empirical results mainly due to adjustment costs of capital. Amongst other extensions, the paper explores topics in the open economy literature. Volatility solves an international macro finance puzzle, reducing the average cross-country output correlation implied by the model to a level consistent with the data. Additionally, I investigate the effects of sovereign spread volatility on the dynamics of variables such as net foreign assets, the current account and the trade balance. Further extensions are explored including the effects of the Great Recession. The paper also contributes to the field of computational economics, developing a new computational algorithm that extends recent higher order pruning results for perturbation methods to account for macroeconomic transformations such as dealing with mixed frequency data, variables that can take both negative and positive values and filters. Regarding high-performance computing, I overcome significant estimation and computational limitations by using high-level parallelism through bash and SLURM scripting making use of multiple job submission on clusters and a novel use of the bash xargs command to automatically schedule tasks over multiple cores, significantly reducing overall runtime from weeks to minutes for the empirical model and from weeks to hours for the DSGE model. Working Papers ‘On Irish Interest Rates and Volatility – A Case Study’. Aug. 2014. ‘Evidence on Real Interest Rate Volatility: A Potent Ingredient’. Jan. 2014. Computers Teaching Experience V Fortran/C, MPI/OpenMP, CUDA, Bash/SLURM, Git, MATLAB/Dynare, Mathematica, R, RATS, EViews, OxMetrics/STAMP, Stata, html/css, GNU/Linux, MS Applications, LATEX 2ε 2014 Adjunct Lecturer: 3rd Year Mathematical Economics, TCD (Autumn) 2013 Adjunct Lecturer: 4th Year Macroeconomics, TCD (Autumn) 2013 Adjunct Lecturer: MSc Econometrics, TCD (Spring) 2013 Adjunct Lecturer: 3rd Year Econometrics, TCD (Spring) 2011 → 2012 Teaching Assistant: 1st Year Introduction to Economics, TCD – nominated for teaching assistantship award – Courses completed : Preparing to Lecture – (TCD, 2012); Introduction to Teaching and Supporting Learning for Postgraduates who Teach – (TCD, 2011); New TA Conference at Searle Center for Teaching Excellence – (Northwestern, 2011) Field Courses Awarded Distinction in all fields. TCD: Trade & Growth, Advanced International Macro, Research Seminars; Williams College: Financial Crises; UBC/TCD: Open Economy Macro; Oxford/UCD: Panel Data Metrics; Northwestern/Pennsylvania/TCD: Methods in Macroeconomic Dynamics/Time Series Methods Audited : University of Pennsylvania: Advanced Time-Series Econometrics, International Macroeconomics with Incomplete Markets & Financial Frictions; International Macro (Stanford/TCD); Time Series Econometrics (AEA 2013); MacroFinancial Analysis (Princeton/TCD); International Finance (Virginia/TCD); Volatility: Measurement, Modelling and Forecasting (EUI Florence/EACBN); Tools for Macroecomists: Advanced Tools (LSE Methods Summer Programme); TCHPC: TCHPC Systems, Linux, Bash Shell Scripting, Parallel Programming, CUDA Academic Service 2014 → Student Administrator: TCD International Macro Group blog 2012 → 2013 Class Representative: Economics research postgraduates, TCD 2012, 2013 Student Representative: Supplemental First Appeal Court, TCD 2012, 2013 Student Representative: Court of First Appeal, TCD
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