Interview with Christiane Baumeister

At an age when most children would be looking at storybooks, Christiane Baumeister was drawn to supply and demand graphs. "My father was a high school economics teacher, and I loved to spend time in his office browsing through his books," she says. "When I had to pick my field of study in high school, I picked economics, and I never looked back." The selection of her research specialty was similarly serendipitous. When she entered her Ph.D. program in economics at Ghent University in 2005, oil markets were about to experience a remarkable run-up in prices. Between the start of that year and the summer of 2008, the global price for a barrel of Brent crude more than tripled. But, to the puzzlement of many economists at the time, this historic price surge was not immediately accompanied by the slowdown in economic activity and the rise in inflation witnessed during past oil price shocks. That piqued Baumeister's interest, and she decided to focus her research on "understanding and quantifying the drivers of oil price fluctuations as well as their time-varying effects on the macro economy." This task was complemented by her other interest: exploring new econometric modeling methods.