A Busy and Productive Year

Dr. Eren Arbatli, Assistant Professor at the Department of Theoretical Economics at the HSE Faculty of Economics, joined the HSE after finishing a PhD programme at Brown University (USA) in 2013. Eren's spouse and co-author, Dr. Ekim Arbatli, is Assistant Professor at HSE's Faculty of Politics. The HSE LooK spoke to Dr. Arbatli about his current and planned research.

— What have you been working on during this academic year?

— This academic year went by quite fast. It was a busy and quite productive year for me. Besides teaching, I was in charge of counseling those economics majors who are interested in applying to graduate programs abroad. During the second half of the year, I had more of a chance to focus on my ongoing research projects and attend conferences. My joint paper with Ekim Arbatli has recently been accepted. It is a paper where we show that interstate dispute participation has a mitigating effect on the likelihood of coup d'état attempts against the government. Another paper my co-author and I had been working on is under review now. This paper lays out a theory of electoral campaigns where politicians can systematically manipulate the information available to voters to gain undeserved electoral advantage. After a long and tough journey, we have finally arrived to the submission stage for an empirical paper written jointly with Oded Galor and Quamrul Ashraf on intra-population diversity and civil conflict.

— What are your plans for the coming year?

— During the summer and the next academic year, I hope to make progress in my projects that are at a more preliminary stage. For example, I hope to focus on some research for which I obtained a grant from the CAS. This is an offshoot from the aforementioned research on civil conflict. My goal is to explore various channels – both theoretically and empirically –  through which the long-run legacy of the pre-historical exodus of humans out of Africa influenced the geographical distribution of diversity within modern human populations and how this might have influenced the potential for civil conflict. A relatively new project that I have started working on is about the history of regional development in Anatolia. This research will explore the economic, cultural and political heritage of the historical coexistence of different ethnic and religious groups for hundreds of years. This was a project I've been contemplating for a long time. My collaborator Güneş Gökmen from New Economic School and I are quite excited about this research because we hope that it will shed some light on a previously unexplored aspect of the economic history of our home country of Turkey.

More interviews with HSE faculty can be found in The HSE LooK 6(13), July 2014.