Graduate School of Management and Economics

Sharif University of Technology

Azadi Ave., Tehran, Iran
s.mahdihossein@gsme.sharif.edu

June 6, 2022

Center For Macroeconomics

London School of Economics and Political Science
London, UK

Dear Professors,

I am writing to apply for the research assistant position at the Center For Macroeconomics. I am a graduate
(Master's) student of economics at Sharif University of Technology and I expect to defend by August 2022.
Eager to find answers to unanswered questions, I am determined to pursue a career in academia and do a
Ph.D. I believe the Center For Macroeconomics is one the most proper places I can ever work at because
of my deep interest in both Macro and Computational Economics. Macroeconomics has caught my eyes
since my very entrance into the field; Taking a Ph.D. course on computational economics (with a focus on
macro as the topic and Julia as the tool), I found my missing half in academic research! Combining beautiful
concepts and theories from macroeconomics, such as general equilibrium effects of interactions between
various agents, with powerful and exciting programming techniques is what I cherish to focus on for the
rest of my academic life.

Despite being a master's student, I have tried my best to gain research experience in the relatively
short time I had. We (me and one of my classmates) have recently written a working paper titled: "Real or
Financial Shocks? Sources of Macroeconomic Fluctuations in Iran". In this paper, we investigated the
importance of financial shocks in the business cycles of our country. The model of this paper is mainly
based on the work of Jermann and Quadrini (2012)1, but since our country is an oil exporter, we had to
modify the model to account for oil price shocks. The other severe challenge was data: many easily available
macro data for the US that Jermann and Quadrini used were either unavailable or had to be extracted from
various sources. We combined data from a variety of sources (Including data from the Flow of Funds
Account, which was disregarded by most previous research). Finally, we were able to run our model using
Dynare. The result was quite interesting. Our model explained the dynamics of employment (Which most
previous research could not), output, and investment reasonably well. In sum, we showed the significant
role of financial shocks as the source of business cycles in our oil-exporting country, which could be of
important policy implications and merits greater attention in future research.

I have also had the opportunity to work with the "Annual Survey of Industrial Plants" data in another
research project. This is a relatively large data set (with more than 300 variables and 440,000 observations
over 17 years) containing information about industrial plants' production, costs, sales, inputs, etc. This is an
administrative and messy data set, with lots of missing variables and implausible growth rates, which I had
to deal with. The research I have been doing with this data is my thesis, which investigates the contribution

1Jermann, Urban, and Vincenzo Quadrini. 2012. "Macroeconomic Effects of Financial Shocks." American Economic Review,
102 (1): 238-71.
of different factors to the observed capital misallocation in my country by using a structural model (using
MATLAB and STATA). By estimating the model's parameters using methods such as SMM and GMM, I
was able to disentangle the role of different factors in capital misallocation.

Lastly, I would like to give you my sincere thanks for spending your time reading this letter. I am
looking forward to hearing from you, and I am available to give an interview or provide more details about
my work at any time.

Yours sincerely,

Seyed Mahdi Hosseini Maasoum.

Economics Student at Sharif University of Technology.