An Introduction

Hello! My name is Ricardo R. Rodriguez-Padilla. At the present moment, I’m a Senior at Columbia University just a month away from graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Financial Economics and Business Management. After graduation, I’m lucky to be staying in New York City to work as an Analyst at the economic and financial consulting firm, Cornerstone Research. I hope to use my experience there as an exploration of many of the topics that I’m most passionate about in Economics. In particular, I hope to gain some further insight into topics in Industrial Organization, and use my time there as research experience I can put to use for a PhD in Economics a couple of years down the line.

Like many other people, I view Economics as a tool and a framework with which to think about and address many of the issues of our day. While many of these may be more “traditionally” in the realm of what people think about when they hear “Economics” (i.e. finance, money, growth, etc.), I’m particularly passionate about applying economic models to explore and consider less “traditional” questions, specially on the individual-scale of Microeconomics and in Cultural Economics.

I’m sure many would agree that Economics does not have all the answers; it often relies on simplifying assumptions, and the validity of those assumptions is often questionable in many scenarios. But economic models help provide a framework with which to begin exploring and identifying both the big-picture and microscopic-level questions we must ask when thinking about a problem or a phenomenon. To that extent, Economics can certainly inform and enlighten our analysis of policies and of organizational, individual, and macro-level decisions. Economic thinking can aid us in formulating and testing hypotheses, discovering factors we hadn’t considered before in a problem, guide our understanding, and ultimately provide preliminary (and sometimes, final) answers to the questions we’re trying to answer.

While I have many questions I’d like to answer, perhaps my most motivating questions are the ones that guide both those who are passionate about Economics and actual Economists (a rank I’d like to join myself soon). The questions that guide most of what I (and many others) think about are: What can I do to contribute to our understanding of behavior and decision-making (and the incentives and factors that play into those decisions)? More generally, how can I help understand and draw connections between the causes and the effects of the phenomena and the decisions by individuals, organizations, and nations-at-large that we see in our world and society today? And most importantly, how can I use that knowledge to create new, optimal effects through better, more informed decision-making, and ultimately (as cliché as it may sound) make our world a better place?

I hope this blog will serve as a place where I can explore some of the economic questions I’m concerned with as I hopefully move closer to a PhD in Economics.