Koustav De, PhD

I grew up in Calcutta, India, a city many associate with the literary giant Rabindranath Tagore, economist Amartya Sen, or Mother Teresa. But I associate it with lively, warm, argumentative people whose passionate debates leave nothing untouched -- from the global financial crisis to the disappearing colonial architecture from the heart of Calcutta.

I believe I carry this spirit of questioning everything, but more in depth than in breadth. Although I had strong interest in economics, I grew up in a family that migrated just a generation back from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) during the violent partition of 1947. Elders of the family persuaded me to take the "safe" career option of studying engineering at Jadavpur University (JU).

But at JU my interest in economics deepened, along with my interest in politics. Soon I was traveling to villages seeing the pros and cons of microfinance. I documented the puzzle of starving tea garden workers even as the tea export industry boomed, witnessing farmers refusing compensation and fighting forceful land acquisition by their elected government.

Not long after I completed my engineering, I applied to Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) for an M.S. in Quantitative Economics and got invited to Indian School of Business (ISB) to do a short research internship. I researched option pricing, mutual fund efficiencies, and family owned businesses of India. With my research experience and encouragement of my professors I was confident I wanted to pursue a PhD and an academic career. I applied for a PhD and took a job at Deloitte. But for my PhD interview, when I was asked whether I wanted to give up my job and put in blood, sweat, and tears in research, I clearly knew the answer.

The Stephen M. Ross School of Business is among the few schools where the collaboration with departments like economics is strong. Coming from ISI I got in touch with statistics PhD students at Michigan, some of whom worked as research associates at Ross, and heard from them about the broad interdisciplinary scope. I also had friends from my engineering school doing their MBAs and they praised the faulty, infrastructure, the Tozzi Center, in-house gym, etc. I also had the opportunity to get in touch with a finance PhD student who had been at ISB and learned about the flexibility in choice of coursework and the multiple seminars per week where recent work in finance was rigorously discussed. My professors at ISI also had only good things to say about Ross and the faculty. With such diverse and positive feedback Ross was naturally among my top choices and after joining the finance department as a PhD student I only have points to add to the list.

Besides independent research and working with professors, I’m taking courses in finance and economics. My focus as of now is asset pricing, specifically consumption-based asset pricing, but my interest is wide. Last summer I worked on a paper on the disposition effect that involved behavioral aspects of individual investors.

My present reading involves recent works on factor models explaining cross-sectional returns. So far it has been a thoroughly enjoyable, intellectually challenging, and stimulating experience. Before I joined the PhD program everyone warned me about the Michigan winter, but having roughed out several snowy trekking routes of the Himalayas I was confident. There is no shame in admitting my overconfidence in regard to Michigan winters. But with numerous and diverse hangout places and large student community Ann Arbor more than makes up for its snowy winters.