Recent Grad's Thesis Wows Michael Lewis

For most people, the idea of writing a senior thesis is so daunting that they don’t even bother; for others, it’s a chance to show their community what all of their hard work and research has come down to. But for Anna K. Barnett-Hart ’09, who is currently a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley, her senior thesis resulted not only with honors in economics at graduation but also with an acknowledgment in author Michael Lewis’s latest book, “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.”

As the Wall Street Journal blog reports, “Lewis praises ‘A.K. Barnett-Hart, a Harvard undergraduate who had just written a thesis about the market for subprime mortgage-backed CDOs that remains more interesting than any single piece of Wall Street research on the subject’.”

Bartnett-Hart’s thesis, entitled “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis,” was awarded summa cum laude after she turned it in a year ago, today. She won the Harvard Hoopes Prize for her thesis – a prestigious award given each year for outstanding theses, papers, or final projects by junior or seniors.

Bartnett-Hart’s findings? As she explains in her abstract, her research “suggest[s] that the problems in the CDO [Collateralized Debt Obligations, for the non-ec types out there] market were caused by a combination of poorly constructed CDOs, irresponsible underwriting practices, and flawed credit rating procedures.” Seems simple enough. But why couldn’t someone with more experience than an undergrad offer the same insight?

As Lewis told WSJ blog reporters, “[Bartnett-Hart’s thesis] was a classic example of the innocent going to Wall Street and asking the right questions. [It] shows there were ways to discover things that everyone should have wanted to know. That it took a 22-year-old Harvard student to find them out is just outrageous.”

Moral of the story, fellow Harvard undergraduates: your simplicity and inexperience can actually be to your advantage. Secondary lesson: write a thesis.