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Matteo Maggiori and Patrick Phillips named Andrew Carnegie Fellows

Stanford Professors Matteo Maggiori and Patrick Phillips are among the 28 Andrew Carnegie Fellows named in 2022.

Matteo Maggiori, a professor of finance at the Graduate School of Business and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and Patrick Phillips, a professor of English at the School of Humanities and Sciences, and director of the Creative Writing Program have been named 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellows. They join a class of 28 fellows, each of whom receives up to $200,000 to support their research in their chosen field.

Matteo Maggiori (Image credit: Courtesy of Matteo Maggiori)

Maggiori, an expert in international macroeconomics and finance, plans to use the fellowship to carry out new research on China’s efforts to position its currency, the renminbi, as an international currency. This includes creating new statistics and analyses of Chinese financial assets held around the world to help shed light on what the rise of the renminbi as an international currency could mean for the global financial system and on possible policy responses.

“I am delighted to be awarded the Carnegie Fellowship,” Maggiori said, “and am grateful to the Foundation for affording me the freedom and flexibility to pursue my research.”

Maggiori focuses his research on global capital flows, tax havens, exchange rate dynamics, the international monetary system, and the role of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, among other topics.

He’s paid particularly close attention to the rise of China as a global financial player: In a paper published last year, for example, he helped highlight how official statistics on the amount of Chinese assets held by developed countries, like U.S. or European investors, vastly underestimate the actual value and, as a result, the extent of risk exposure to China these countries face. The reason, Maggiori and his co-researchers found, is because official data omitted the amount of equities and bonds that Chinese companies issue through subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens.

And a new working paper co-authored by Maggiori examines how China, as part of its strategy to internationalize the renminbi, has carefully controlled when different sets of investors gain access to its bond market.

“China – specifically, its integration into world financial markets – has been one of the most significant global developments of the last 20 years,” Maggiori said. “This requires new international economic policies, and the opportunity to provide the research to help guide them is exciting for economists like me.”

Maggiori says he is intrigued by the rapid growth in foreign holdings of China’s massive domestic bond market. “Why is it happening, how much do we need to worry about it and how will it affect other countries?” he asks.

Maggiori, who came to Stanford in 2019 after teaching at Harvard, is also co-founder and director of the Global Capital Allocation Project. The project – also led by Brent Neiman at the University of Chicago and Jess Schreger at Columbia University – aims to improve international economic policymaking through insights into the global allocation of capital.

For Maggiori, who earned his PhD in finance from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012, the Carnegie Fellowship is the latest in a growing list of accolades. Among other awards, he received the top early-career honor in finance, the Fischer Black Prize, in 2021. Before that, he received a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2019 Carlo Alberto Medal for the best Italian economist under the age of 40.

Patrick Phillips (Image credit: Marion Ettinger/Courtesy of Blue Flower Arts)

Phillips is a poet, author, teacher, and translator. His writing frequently explores themes related to race relations, complex family relationships, working-class life for earlier generations, and parenthood.

His book, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (Norton, 2016), was named best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian, and received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He is also the author of three poetry collections, including Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Chattahoochee, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize.

Phillips said the Carnegie Fellowship “will pay for some tangible things like books, rental cars, and airplane tickets. But the most precious commodity it will provide is time: time to conduct interviews in faraway places; time to mine courthouse and library archives; time to sit at my desk, chiseling away at sentences.”

“My Carnegie project continues work I began in a book called Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, which chronicles the racial terrorism that transformed my homeplace of Forsyth County, Georgia, when all 1,098 African American residents were violently expelled by their white neighbors in 1912,” Phillips said.

“With this new research I want to move beyond just documenting such episodes, and instead follow the money that so often flowed across the color line in the wake of mob attacks – as one ‘abandoned’ Black property after another was bought, seized, or silently absorbed into the property of local whites,” said Phillips. “I’ll be focused on a book project called The Kellogg Place: American Wealth in Black and White. I hope to show just how closely America’s racial wealth gap is tied to the land beneath our feet.”

Phillips has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Copenhagen, and the Lyric Poetry Award of the Poetry Society of America.

On learning of his selection as a Carnegie Fellow, Phillips said, “The Carnegie Fellowship is a really lovely and unexpected honor. … I owe a great debt to Senior Associate Dean Gabriella Safran and English Department Chair Ato Quayson, who have supported my project from the beginning. I’m also grateful to the brilliant teachers and writers in the Creative Writing Program. Just being around so much talent is inspiring.”

The Carnegie Corporation of New York was established in 1911 by Andrew Carnegie to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.