Passion for data and its application in the economy

This is how Elena Manresa, winner of the XXI Fundació Banc Sabadell Prize for economic research, sums up her expertise. This week’s award was given to him for his work in the field of microeconometrics and especially his contribution to the application of panel data analysis and social interaction studies. As he put it, his task is to “develop statistical methods applied to economic problems”.

The jury for this edition, chaired by Teresa Garcia-Milà, “highlighted the high level of creativity in Professor Manresa’s work and her contribution to changing the way applied economists deal with the analysis of new large databases and complex data such as individual databases. linked data of employees and companies or detailed data of consumers and products”.

Born in 1982 in Saint Paul, Minnesota (USA). Cox’s parents, who were natives and later moved to Barcelona to study at the University, were preparing their doctorate at the time, and so the future professor was born in the United States. At the age of two, the family returned to Barcelona, ​​where he grew up and began his studies. It is therefore considered “Catalan, Alicante and Midwestern”.

After meditating on different disciplines, from music to literature or biology, he preferred numbers. He studied Mathematics at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), a career that he considered “versatile” and would later devote himself to “different things in the future”. From this science he learned “formalism”, that is, “writing problems in mathematical language and then solving them effectively.”

By the end of the degree, he realized that he was missing a more practical aspect of everything he had learned. “I wanted to think about less abstract problems,” she recalls. And this led him to a master’s degree in Economics and Finance at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies (CEMFI) in Madrid, as he was told it was the “most official” institution for this type of discipline. And it clearly assures: “I like to know why things are done, not just how to do it”. And she got her master’s degree with almost no contact with economics.

He discovered econometrics in this course and, to this day, has declared his love for this specialty to which he dedicates himself body and soul. Just as statisticians work for doctors or biologists to measure the effects of medical procedures or drugs, “we econometricians are economists’ statisticians,” he explains.

And that differentiates them, he argues, because economic data is generated by smart individuals who optimize and, in principle, choose the best option. He says his statistical methods have a lot to do with “unobservable heterogeneity in economic agents.” And he gives the example of the economy of labor and the inequality of wages. This can be explained by differences in education, gender, experience… But even when these variables are taken into account, there is still a large disparity in wages. “Often, these differences that we don’t capture with observable data are part of individuals’ decision making, and failing to take them into account can lead to erroneous conclusions about the impact of some policies,” says Elena Manresa.

According to Manresa, the level of Econometrics in Spain is “very high”. And also that of Economics in his view. “Spain produces very good econometricians and generally very good economists,” he says.

Fundació Banc Sabadell award winner and visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Yale University, and Stanford University, among other centers. His research has been published in the most prestigious journals in economics such as Econometrica, Journal of Econometrics or Journal of Financial Economics. He has given numerous seminars and conferences at the world’s leading universities and actively participates in international conferences in his research fields.

In addition, Elena Manresa is the associate editor of Econometrica and the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics (JBES). He is a Sloan Research Fellow by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2021-2023), a prestigious research award for young economists who teach at research centers in North America.