Time flies when you're having fun, and apparently I have had my fair
share lately. Without realizing it all too well I have passed well beyond the
half way mark of the Master programme. I passed both last periods courses,
leaving me with only 2 more courses and a thesis, before I have to start
competing in the job market myself. The course Multinational Firms is being
teached by one of my favourite Profs, and aims at providing state of the art
insights of the current line of thought in economics on the individual firm
level. The other course, Empirics of Globalization, aims at explaining the
global patterns of Globalization over a very long time span. Me and a fellow
student are currently writing on a paper which hopefully can serve as a critique
on a famous paper “The Reversal of Fortune” by Acemoglu, Johson & Robinson.
As I mentioned above, we are approaching the Master thesis rapidly, which meant
we had to subscribe to one of the topics recently. All in all this has been
rather stressful, for various reasons. At the first date, there were some IT
issues which had to be sorted out before students could sign up for their
favourite subject. Therefore the ‘excitement’ was postponed for 3 days, at 9
A.M. sharp. Again, something went wrong with the subscription procedure,
effectively meaning I was refreshing the wrong folder for several minutes, only
to find out the subject picking procedure had started in another folder. When I
finally accessed this folder, my top 3 choices of topics were of course gone,
so I had to look for an alternative. In the end I found a topic and after
subscription I actually felt rather content. I’m going to check whether there
is a home effect for foreign subsidiaries of multinational firms. I came to
realize I liked this topic better than my previous top 3, so it worked out in
that sense, and I’m going to have the supervisor of my choice. All in all I’m
looking forward to writing the thesis, although this will prove to be my final
study assignment at the Utrecht School of Economics. The last part of my study
career will probably also be the busiest, but I will try to post a new blog
regularly to get you an idea what is going on!
