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Asking the Big Questions
By Nancy Moffitt
Wharton undergraduate scholars tackle heavy-duty finance problems.
Stephen “Blake” Nesbitt’s fascination with pensions began when he was a 15-year-old intern collecting data at Wilshire Associates, where his father Steve Nesbitt, WG’78, worked at the time.
Blake’s summer job was to sift through financial reports
and collect data on corporate, state, and municipal pension
plans — many of which were Wilshire clients — to help prepare
the institutional investment practice’s annual survey of
public and private pension systems.
And while his job was simply data collection, his father
taught also him about the economics of pension plans and
the complicated work of actuaries. “This was my first introduction
to the concept of time-value of money and I was absolutely
fascinated,” says Nesbitt, W’07. He spent the next
two summers at Wilshire getting more and more involved
with the annual pension surveys, not realizing that, during
those summers, he was collecting data for fiscal years 20002002,
the main time period of interest for research he would
later undertake as a Wharton undergraduate with pension
icon and Wharton professor Olivia S. Mitchell — work that
would result in a scholarly article that he co-authored.
Nesbitt’s experience is far from unusual among Wharton
undergraduate students today, where the rigors of research
play a key role.
Undergraduate research takes different forms. Established
programs such as the Joseph Wharton Scholars Program, the
Benjamin Franklin Scholars Program, and the University
Scholars Program, among others, include a research component,
as do Independent Study projects and research assistantships.
More recently, new programs such as the Wharton Research
Scholars Program and the Wharton Summer Research Grants
Program brought together funding to offer more Wharton students
the chance to dig deep into an area of interest.
In the pages that follow, the Wharton Alumni Magazine talks to a handful of young scholars, whose varied, far-reaching
projects set a whole new standard.
- Valuing Defined Benefit Pensions
- Examining the Finance in Microfinance
- The Impact of Second-Lien Loans
- Examining Investor Overconfidence
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