The Sixth Research Conference for Students and Young Researchers – Banking Sector and Monetary Policy: Future Prospects – took place on 19 May 2023. The National Bank of Ukraine and the Kyiv School of Economics have been hosting this event annually since 2017, with the exception of a forced break in 2022.
“I’m happy that the NBU is resuming its interactions with young researchers and students, for at least two reasons. One is that during the more than a year of the full-scale invasion, we managed to restore a lot of things that otherwise would have been lost. The other, more practical, reason is that we need to take a fresh look at the events we are currently experiencing and the challenges we are overcoming. During this conference, you will have the honor to talk to Ukraine’s top specialists in macroeconomics and forecasting. You should make the most of this communication, test your ideas, and be bold in your proposals. We will review the results of your research and hopefully find insights that can inform our forecasts and lay the groundwork for our decisions, or maybe we will discover new talent,” said NBU Governor Andriy Pyshnyy in his welcoming speech.
Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Monetary Economics, Professor at the University of California (Berkeley), one of the world’s best macroeconomists, and an adviser to the NBU Governor, was invited to this year’s conference as a keynote speaker. During the event, he delivered the lecture Current Inflation in the Advanced Economies.
The conference program included research presentations grouped into two thematic sessions:
- Macroeconomic modeling and forecasting.
- Financial stability and digital markets.
Specifically, the finalists’ research papers focused on the following topics:
- measuring economic activity in wartime
- modeling inflation expectations amid macroeconomic instability and war
- agricultural commodity price dynamics
- tracking down price dynamics of agricultural products
- short-term forecasting of global energy and metal prices
- corporate credit growth development
- determinants of the debt burden of nonfinancial corporations
- nonperforming loans and lending dynamics
- cryptocurrency price modeling and forecasting.
Because of the overall rather high level of research and the variety of topics covered, the organizers decided to announce the three best papers without designating specific places to any of them. A committee of NBU and KSE experts picked the following winners:
- Olga Bondarenko (NBU), with the paper Short-Term Forecasting of Global Energy and Metal Prices: VAR and VECM Approaches
- Tetiana Stasiuk (National University of Ostroh Academy), with the study Modeling and Forecasting the Price of Cryptocurrency
- Roman Soltysiak (NBU), with the paper What Affects the Level of the Debt Burden of Ukraine’s Nonfinancial Corporations?
The authors of the prize-winning studies received valuable awards: Archstrategist Mykhail coins, made of investment silver, from the NBU, and gift certificates for one of the optional master’s-level courses taught at the Kyiv School of Economics.
The best papers will be recommended for publication in the journal Visnyk of the National Bank of Ukraine.