Spotlighted Student: WIlliam Corkery '17

Playing soccer for a college with strong academics was priority for William Corkery '17. Haverford’s soccer Coach Shane Rineer saw Will playing at a game and the recruiting began. After Will, who plays center midfield, visited the campus and did an overnight with the men’s soccer team, he witnessed firsthand the comradery and closeness of the team.

Will had been mathematically and natural science oriented through high school with an affinity for finance, stocks and the market. When he took Professor David Owens’ Introduction to Economics he was introduced to the blending of math, science and finance. It was perfectly suited to his interests. He continued taking economics courses and added a Statistics Minor to his Economics major. Econometrics with Professor Anne Preston, and Professor Carola Binder’s Junior Research Seminar on The Federal Reserve, have been economic course highlights. One of Will’s most thrilling moments was when Professor Carola Binder’s class went to Washington, DC to meet with Federal Reserve past President and economist Ben Bernanke.

Serving as the Chief Economist for Haverford Investments Gurus, Will advises the club members on investment strategies by staying on top of world news and Federal Reserve policies.

Will has enriched his undergraduate education with summer internships. The summer following his freshman year he worked for Ceres Technologies, a mergers and acquisitions advisory firm in his hometown of Needham, Massachusetts.  As an intern he learned about the processes of evaluating and appraising technological businesses in the laser and optics industry.

After his sophomore year he spent the summer working in Conshohocken, PA for John Templeton Foundation, an endowment management firm. His primary role as an intern was to monitor portfolios invested in Blue Chip stocks.

This past summer he lived in New York City and worked for JP Morgan’s Alternatives Team where he served as a researcher focused on real estate investments, hedge-funds and private equity assets. After he graduates he is returning to JP Morgan as a research analyst with aspirations of going to business school with a career in equity.

Will’s thesis will be investigating housing prices in the United States, looking through the lens of housing bubble rises and falls. More specifically he will look at previous housing price increases and their subsequent falls to attempt to find a better predictor of future home prices than through typical methods. Typical methods for forecasting home prices use lagged data, survey data and expert predictions for the trend in home prices. Alternately he will be using search query data to see if it is a better predictor for forecasting home prices. The benefit of search query data is instantaneous access to data, and people are more honest with Google searches than they are with survey questions. Using Google Trends data on housing related searches, he aims to create an index to predict future home prices. This is in line with a lot of recent literature coming out on the topic of ‘nowcasting’ and using search query data to improve economic forecasting models. “I hope to find this search query data to be a better predictor of home price fluctuations and potentially to add to the literature on housing bubbles,” says Will.