Internship Spotlight: Jumoke Akinwusi ’21, Yale Program on Financial Stability

We asked rising second-year MBA students to check in from their summer internships, where they are applying the lessons of their first year at Yale SOM.

Jumoke Akinwusi ’21
Internship: Research Associate, Yale Program on Financial Stability, New Haven, Connecticut

Hometown: Lagos, Nigeria
Preferred Gender Pronouns: she/her/hers
Degree: Master of Advanced Management
Clubs and Affiliations: Vice President, Africa Business & Society Club
Favorite SOM Class: Competitive Strategy, Economic Analysis of High-Tech Industries
Favorite SOM Professor: A.J. Wasserstein
Favorite New Haven eatery: Harvest

I spent my summer working on the COVID-19 Financial Response Tracker (CFRT), a project under the leadership of Professor Andrew Metrick at the Yale Program on Financial Stability. The tracker is designed to inform citizens, policymakers, and government officials about state actions against COVID-19.

My project involved tracking, monitoring, and reporting regulatory measures by central banks, fiscal authorities, and international organizations to counter COVID-related financial and economic distress. I worked across several countries like Israel, Nigeria, Kuwait, Ghana, Iraq, Botswana, Algeria, and the UAE. The interventions by different countries varied from small business grants, interest rate reductions, loan moratoriums, tax reliefs, and economic support grants to families and students to unemployment benefits and wage increments.

A course on financial stability regulation that I took earlier in spring 2021 helped a great deal in preparing me for this internship. The course helped to understand different regulatory landscapes across various jurisdictions using a comparative approach. We also explored lessons from major economies on management of systemic risk and fighting financial crises. This helped to examine the effectiveness of various tools employed by policy makers during the global financial crisis.

This project gave me an opportunity to work closely with Professor Andrew Metrick, Christian McNamara, and a team of research associates composed of students at SOM and other experts with varying background in finance, law, and politics. My highlight of this research project is the bi-weekly call where we all came together to discuss economic trends around the world with implications for financial stability.

 I also really enjoyed the flexibility this internship gave me. I was able to travel across the U.S. and Canada while working remotely.