Professor

My Life in Brief

What follows is a biographical sketch of a fairly boring but very happy life: MY LIFE. Readers looking for adventure and excitement beware: it may be safer for you to skip most of (or, better yet, all of) what follows and continue surfing the Internet for more interesting stuff.

For those of you still with me, let me begin at the beginning. Although I cannot remember it because it seems that I was very busy at the time, I have been told that I was born on May 1, 1961 in Carlos Casares, Argentina. My father was a farmer there, so I lived with my family (i.e., my parents and my two sisters) in the farm until 1968. In those early years, I had to play alone or with my sisters because there were no other kids around. My sisters are older than me and liked to play teachers, so that I had no choice but to play their student. Although unintended, those games had lasting effects because I learned how to read and write before attending school, and both of my sisters ended up becoming real-life teachers.

The primary school where I attended first grade was in the middle of nowhere and very small by most standards. The whole school had only one teacher and six students (one of them being one of my sisters). Although a 6:1 student-teacher ratio looks excellent, having a single instructor in charge of teaching all grades is not conducive to a high-quality education. Luckily for me, my parents realized that fact soon after I finished first grade, so that we all moved to the nearby town of Carlos Casares (pop. 12,000) in search of a better school.

Moving to Carlos Casares was shocking to me because I had never seen so many kids of my age before, and I had no clue as to how to socialize with them. At first, I looked forward to the weekends because I could then commute with my father to the farm and re-enact the good old days. Slowly, however, I began to adapt to the new life and to take advantage of the opportunities it offered, such as practicing many sports and studying English.

By the time I finished high-school I was very comfortable living in Carlos Casares.  However, it was time for me to move again as I wanted to study agronomy and the nearest university was 200 miles away from home. At that time I made a decision with long-lasting effects. I was completely convinced that I would return to Carlos Casares and farm after graduating from the university. Hence, I decided to study at the Universidad de Buenos Aires because that was (I thought) the only chance I would ever have to experience what life in a mega-city was like.

For the first year after moving to Buenos Aires, I hated myself for that decision. I missed my hometown badly and could find nothing nice about living in a huge city. With time, however, I began to appreciate the opportunities for intellectual development that Buenos Aires had to offer. After taking farm management in my senior year, I was offered a research/teaching assistantship for that course. I was delighted to accept the assistantship. That is how I became acquainted with a group of professors who told me that I should consider getting an M.Sc. degree abroad. Among them was Prof. Regunaga, whom I chose as my thesis advisor.

At that time Prof. Regunaga was also Director of Economic Studies at the Argentine Grain Board (he later became Argentina's Secretary of Agriculture). My thesis was about the Buenos Aires futures market, and apparently Prof. Regunaga liked it, because he invited me to work at the Grain Board as a commodity analyst. I said a big YES! for several reasons. First, I liked the idea of studying commodity markets. Second, there were almost no jobs for agronomists. Third, I had decided to follow my professors' advise and search for an opportunity to get an M.Sc. degree abroad, and living in Buenos Aires made such a search much easier (proof of this is the Argentine saying "God is everywhere but has the office in Buenos Aires").

That was the year 1984. I had already postponed moving back to Carlos Casares to farm for some time. Instead, I decided to begin traveling back home every other weekend to take charge slowly of my father's farm. This turned out to be a great idea for several reasons that I had not foreseen when I first thought of it. First, it made me discover that farm work was not all that glamorous after all, and that now I liked it better to live in Buenos Aires than in Carlos Casares. Second, I realized that my father would be in charge of the farm for as long as he lived, and that there was no room for me. Third and more important, on one of those trips I met Marta (now my wife) and I immediately fell in love with her.

Marta and I had both grown up in the same small hometown, but we had never met before 1984, because I am almost six years older than her. That is why my friends nicknamed me "polio" (it only attacks infants). Against the advice of her friends (I was "too old for her"), we began dating. Early in 1986 I received the news that Iowa State University was offering me an assistantship while working towards an M.Sc. degree in Agricultural Economics. Marta and I then agreed that we would try to continue dating after my trip to the U.S. We reasoned that there were two possible outcomes; namely, our relationship could either survive the distance, or not. In either case, we would know for sure how strong our feelings were.

I arrived in Ames in August, 1986. Things went well with my studies at Iowa State, and after the first semester I was offered the option to continue the assistantship for a Ph.D. I was thrilled with the idea, but I was in love with Marta and she was in Argentina. Therefore, I accepted the assistantship with the condition that I could go back to Argentina for one year after finishing my M.Sc. degree. Things went as planned and in August, 1988 I returned to Argentina to work again for the Grain Board and the University of Buenos Aires.

By then, Marta and I had no doubts that what we felt was love, and we married at the beginning of 1989. That year back in Argentina was great emotionally, but a complete disaster professionally. Argentina suffered a deep economic crisis and I had to devote most of my intellectual energies devising ways to survive until my next paycheck. For example, in a single month (July 1989) the consumer price index increased by 200 percent. There were also strikes, energy shortages, shortages of running water, etc. By the time I returned to Ames in August, 1989 I was almost ready for therapy.

Unfortunately, Marta could not join me when I came back to Iowa State to pursue my Ph.D. degree because at that time she was attending Pharmacy School at the University of Buenos Aires. Therefore, I started "commuting" to Argentina for a couple of weeks every six months to see her. Although I liked the idea of staying in the U.S., Marta did not know whether she would be able to adapt to a different culture. Therefore, she came to live in Ames right before I finished in 1991 to see whether she liked living here. Marta felt at home in Ames, so I began searching for a job so we could stay in the U.S.

I was extremely happy to join the faculty at Iowa State's Department of Economics in the Fall of 1993. Since then I have been teaching and working on a number of issues. My reserach program has involved both theoretical and applied topics. More specifically, my research has spanned (among others) the following areas: financial markets, hedging, and the impact of financial markets on real decisions; the use of portfolio models from finance in decisions regarding optimal land allocation; the magnitude and behavior of the protection premium in situations involving endogenous risk; the value of information; and estimation risk. A major proportion of my current research agenda focuses on asset pricing, land allocation and input use in the presence of uncertainty and risk aversion, optimal leverage, and credit rationing.

For those of you who have been brave enough to read up to this point, let me finish by saying that Marta and I have truly enjoyed our life here in Ames. We feel that it is almost an ideal place to live and grow. In fact, we feel so strongly about it that we decided to start our family here: Tomas, our first baby was born on February 26, 1996 and Sofia, his sister, was born on May 25, 1998 (by the way, May 25 is Argentina's national holiday). My objective opinion, as well as Marta's, is that Tomas and Sofia are the most well-behaved, lovely, and beautiful children in the world (not that we are their parents!!!).