After earning my B.A. from Smith College with a major in sociology in 1998, I moved to New York City where I spent five years working in a small derivatives firm called GenRe Securities. There I produced daily, monthly, and quarterly reports for the credit department, an experience that left me fascinated with the ways people interpret, classify, and account for risks. GenRe is also where I first learned about securitization, a now-infamous process that companies use to spin groups of assets (like mortgages and life insurance policies) into even more lucrative bonds.
As a graduate student in sociology I seek to understand the historical, cultural, and political forces that shaped those experiences. My master’s thesis examined the relationship between market institutions and morality, using the case of the secondary market for life insurance to show how markets can transform our sense of decency. As part of this study, I found that the introduction of securitization in this market had fostered a more distant, impersonal, rationalized understanding of the practice. This impersonal ethic stood in stark contrast to the intimate, highly emotional understandings of those who worked closely with the terminally ill, or a sense of revulsion often felt by people who were unfamiliar with the industry. Results from this study were published in the American Journal of Sociology.
My dissertation returns to the topic of securitization. The housing bubble was at its apex when I first began seriously considering securitization as a topic in the winter of 2007. As I wrote my prospectus that June, the bottom had just started to fall out of the subprime market. In the summer of 2007, while the investment banks started to topple, I was in the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential archives learning about how the credit crunch of 1966 spurred the government to promote the securitization market. In view of these events, many people have congratulated me on anticipating the meltdown. The truth is, I chose to study securitization because it was surprisingly understudied given its widespread and sometimes problematic use. I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about how technologies and fields evolve together, and a chance to study how culture and politics shaped the development of risk management techniques in financial markets. At the time I had no idea that this relatively obscure topic was about to become front-page news.
