Daniel Peredo Siles

I am Daniel Peredo Siles and my four-month summer internship was at the Advocacy and Research department. I am doing my PhD in Hanken School of Economics and focusing on behavioral economics, but also very involved in development economics. Those two are my main objectives and ideally, I’ll have my thesis covered in both aspects.

Exploring Finnish gambling market and researching gambling behavior

Here in the FCCA I was doing data management and policy evaluation related tasks, where I wanted to understand if the data would be useful to explore possible inconsistencies in the risk-taking behavior of gamblers using a very vast data set. My main task was working to make sense of the data and to think of ways to use it to answer policy relevant questions. Coinciding with FCCA interests, we were looking into how to use the data to evaluate policies from Veikkaus, for example, to find out how well they have been working in curbing problem-gambling. Therefore, we need to understand and share the positive experiences from the policies that Veikkaus has been implementing to see which ones were more effective/less effective and under what circumstances.

Internship forced me to think outside the box

During my internship I have learned a lot about the gambling market structure here in Finland and all the regulatory changes that have been going on for the past five years. It’s the first time I’ve worked with data this large, so it helped me a lot to think outside the box and think of new ways of testing hypothesis and treating this data. I have learned how making small changes in the way you use a variable can have a big impact in the processing time.

FCCA has a very collaborative environment and helping colleagues

My supervisor was always helping and guiding me, we had frequent meetings to discuss my progress with the data and what to focus on going forward as well as encouraging me to continue attending the research seminars at the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics.  The rest of the team was helpful as well, we shared some insights and pointers with each other, for example, how to treat the data in a more efficient way. I can describe it as a very collaborative environment here.

Best thing in my internship were the casual coffee table conversations with other employees, where you can learn a lot about colleagues and the work they are doing. As an expat, having my colleagues being interested in my culture, offering me a helping hand and them providing me with insights about life in Finland was a very nice experience and it made for a very enjoyable work environment.

To whom you recommend KKV as a place to work?

I can recommend FCCA to anyone who wants to do applied work like empirical analysis, as a PhD student I can attest to the importance of having access to interesting data and being encouraged to explore your research ideas in a flexible environment. My recommendation goes specially to anyone who wants to get access to different data sets, because the nature of the institute gives the possibility to get access to interesting data that would otherwise be difficult to access as an individual or as part of most private organizations. In FCCA the data catalogue and availability of data sets is broad, so there is a lot of research potential.