Cyrillic Partners

Biography:
I’ve put a decade’s worth of work into becoming an expert in international trade and industrial organization, culminating in the PhD I hope to earn this spring. I’ve worked in government, started my own company and studied at the highest levels of academia.

My road started with a major in Finance and International Affairs at the Belorussian State Economic University. I knew when I started that trade and finance were the engines of economic growth and I wanted to learn how they worked. I worked hard and received my Bachelor of Arts with Honors in 2001.

I didn’t want to stop learning after I graduated, so I applied to work at the International Trade Department at the Ministry of Statistics and Analysis in Belarus. It was the right move for me and I felt right at home (despite a three hour commute each way!). The Ministry must have felt the same way, because it promoted me to senior economist six months after I started working. There I helped to implement trade policy and recommend changes that would help my country’s businesses to thrive. It felt good to apply what I had studied.

But I wanted to learn even more. So I applied to the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education (CERGE-EI) in Prague, which has one of the most well-regarded economics graduate programs in Europe. I specialized in transitional economies, countries changing from command and control economies to market economies, and earned my MA there.

I developed the idea for my PhD thesis while I was at CERGE-EI and submitted it to the World Bank. The organization awarded me a grant in 2004 to pursue this research.

I’ve always felt that knowledge must be accompanied by an experience. So I started a small business in Ukraine while still a student in Prague. The idea was simple: employ highly-skilled, low cost labor in Ukraine to paint hand-made designs on silk imported from the U.S. and dyes from France. The company then sold the finished product at a significant mark-up back to U.S. consumers. I quickly learned what a head ache border restrictions, trade tariffs and transportation problems can be.

I wanted to continue my research and expand it to encompass some of the lessons I learned from running a small business. I applied to Clemson University’s PhD program in economics where I worked with Professor Scott Baier, an award-winning prominent professor of international trade who is now serving as a senior economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. I focused my studies at Clemson on industrial organization and financial economics and international trade. My primary research applies the gravity equation to understand the effects of colonization on international trade (see the paper here). I have also researched the macroeconomic principles that drive growth in developing countries and transitioning economies. My entire curriculum vitae is available here.

My professional interests cut a wide swath, covering everything from civil litigation-oriented economic inquiry to measuring returns from private equity investment. I am fluent in Russian and Ukrainian and sometimes go by the name Olga, which Americans seem to have an easier time pronouncing.