In this episode Santiago talks with Gani Aldashev, professor of Economics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, about the backstory of his paper, "Relationships in the Wild: How Institutions Affect the Governance of Firms", that discusses how the “best practices” for firm governance vary according to the strength of political institutions [Working paper = https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7k1j3z5p8qfiq803lxeri/Aldashev-Rantakari-Zanarone-Dec-24.pdf?rlkey=4wvs9qeorvdk2djd8pybeqiwa&e=1&dl=0].

Gani shares how the idea came from both reflecting on firms’ performance in his own context growing up as well as noting how two different literatures had built up without talking to each other: firm governance theories that abstract from political institutions and political economy models that ignore the role of firms.

Gani also shares with us some advice on how to start building a model. Here is a list of articles he finds useful for junior researchers on starting to work on a model and building a research agenda:

Hal Varian: How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time on JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/25604102

Paul Krugman: how to be a crazy economist in Foundations of research in economics : how do economists do economics?  https://archive.org/details/foundationsofres0000unse_s4e8/page/n9/mode/2up

David M. Kreps: Introduction (First chapter) Game Theory and Economic Modelling  https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=qMoTDAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=kreps+economics&ots=odo3ZepfLt&sig=c8n4--DGhTDoL6cM0x7qINXwYSw#v=onepage&q=kreps%20economics&f=false