Tournament winners Ashwini Agrawal and Oǧuzhan Karakaş with their trophies.
While the world has seen Wimbledon, the ICC Cricket World Cup, the Africa Cup of Nations and the FIFA Women’s Football World Cup all play out this summer, the world of Finance has been focused on a very different kind of international tournament: the 4 Nations Cup. And the Department of Finance is delighted to congratulate Dr Ashwini Agrawal for his role in bringing the trophy back to the UK!
The 4 Nations Cup is a competition that brings the most promising young scholars in financial economics together in one day of mini-seminars. The 40 minutes seminars are given by candidates from the four nations: France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Each nation nominates two lead candidates and at the end of the day, the audience votes for the candidates - the nation with most points receives the cup. The candidates are selected by a scientific committee whose members are affiliated with universities in the participating countries.
The 2019 tournament took place on 10 May at HEC in Paris. The UK team – named Two World Wars and One World Cup! – was made up of LSE’s Ashwini Agrawal and Oǧuzhan Karakaş from the University of Cambridge. Dr Agrawal’s paper “Takeovers and Endogenous Labor reallocation” was one of the papers that brought about the UK team’s victory.
He describes the paper in his own words: “corporate takeovers have a major impact on workers through wage cuts and layoffs, but we know little about how much information workers have about takeovers before they are announced. The paper analyses data from an online job search platform to document new facts that describe how employees look for new jobs around mergers and acquisitions. The data indicate that many workers begin looking for new jobs well before a takeover is publicly announced, and that the workers who appear most sensitive to job changes are the ones who have built up a lot of human capital at their employer over time. The findings illustrate how private information about future corporate events is dispersed across different layers of an organization.”
Tournament participants from the 4 Nations and the judges.
On the tournament, Dr Agrawal said that the 4 Nations Cup was “a great way to interact with scholars from across Europe.” He added, “I gained a great deal from hearing about other people’s research, and I received very helpful feedback on my own work.”
This is not the first victory for the LSE as part of Team GB for the 4 Nations Cup. The British team also won in 2012 with LSE’s Dr Georgy Chabakuri, and in 2013 with Stavros Panageas.