Market discipline and banking crises in Russia: A Reverse Engineered Pitch

: Research is a long journey for a new early career researcher and PhD student. At the early stage, the new researcher needs to build up the “brick” foundation and to communicate well with the advisory team regarding their research progress. Pitching research developed by Faff (2015; 2017) can be a strong tool for answering the confusion of beginner researcher in their initial journey. This pitching research letter offers the author’s experience in implementing Faff’s (2015; 2017) template to the reverse engineering pitch in the area of banking market discipline. This pitching research template has been applied to a published article by Karas et al . (2013), who investigated the market discipline in Russian banking. In addition, this letter conveys a personal reflection regarding the pitching template.


Introduction
"If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects."Albert Einstein Currently, I am undertaking PhD in Finance at University of Queensland (UQ).I love studying and doing research.I admire my lecturers and professors.I also admire the pioneers of knowledge and the great scholars such as Adam Smith, Ibn Khaldun, and Avicenna.What motivates me to embark PhD journey is I want to be a professor within 15 years.However, my PhD journey is not a new and the smooth one.Before I was taking PhD in Accountancy at another institution for more than one year and I had produced a confirmation document of around 120 pages.But I decided to terminate my PhD journey there due to personal reasons.
I began to learn about the pitching research framework from the several occasions such as the pitching research seminar at QUT Business School on 14 th March 2016, and Early Career Women's Pitch Day 2016 by QUT Accounting for Social Change on 2 nd November 2016, and a PhD coursework unit at the University of Queensland: RBUS 6914 in August 2017.Interestingly, when I had participated in Early Career Women's Pitch Day at QUT, I and my team had won the 2016 Best Pitch Award with Social Audit topic.Through this early experience, I found that the pitching research was a powerful tool to identify a particular topic and to construct new ideas for research.Starting a PhD is similar to swimming in the ocean of knowledge.It can be clueless to both PhD student and the supervisory team.Therefore, the pitching research offers the brief and focused template with integrated technical aspects such as data and method and important consideration such as risk and competition.In addition, I learn not only about the pitching but also about the research integrity mindset from RBUS6914.Professor Robert always emphasizes to the PhD students about three things before we start doing research.We have to ensure that we do not violate three rules: "First, it must be legal.Second, it must be ethical and the last one, it must be moral."I think this is the bottom-line if we want to be a good researcher with integrity.Finally, RBUS6914 encourages the student that the research should be a power to create change.And, we can initiate the change by pitching research.
This pitching research letter is structured as follows.In Section 2, I outline the reverse engineering process that I followed in applying the pitching research framework to my chosen area of research interest -market discipline in banking.
Section 3 provides my own personal reflections of this exercise, while Section 4 is the conclusion.

The reverse engineering process
Market discipline is the process by which informed market investors gather and evaluate information about a firm's activities and prospects, and incorporate that information into its traded securities (Flannery & Sorescu, 1996, p. 1356).In the context of banking, market discipline is a situation in which depositors penalize riskier banks by requiring higher interest rates or by withdrawing deposits (Cubillas et al., 2012(Cubillas et al., , p. 2285)).I choose the market discipline areas for the reverse engineering process as this area has not been discussed by any prior pitching research letter and as it is the focus of the first essay for my PhD.Alon (2009) has suggested to the researcher that one should not commit to a research problem before three months have elapsed.Therefore, I choose a market discipline in the case of banking institutions after evaluating the feasibility i of the study and the interest since January 2017.
Table 1 provides the fully reverse engineering pitch.I have spent two weeks for completing the template.The first week, I read 20 market discipline articles.Professor Faff suggests to the student with regard to key papers, we should look for the paper that has been written by "Gurus" or the experts in the field, or the paper that has been published in Tier 1 journals within three years, or a recent working paper found on SSRN.My other supervisor, Dr. Mamiza, guides me that I need to focus on top journals such as Journal of Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, or Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.In addition, she reminds me to look for the paper with "natural experiment" setting.After reading the 20 articles, I find that three articles are interesting.Then, I consult again with my supervisor.I have an option to choose between Karas' paper exploring the Russian case in 2013 or Lambert's paper with the United States case in 2017.Since I plan to look at market discipline within an emerging countries context, I choose Karas' paper with the title "Deposit Insurance, Banking Crises, and Market Discipline: Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Deposit Flows and Rates" as a key paper for reverse engineering pitch.In addition, personal experience also affects me to choose this paper since I had ever attended a conference in Russia and had some Russian friends, so I feel some familiarity with Russia.
The second week, I focused on the template.Before completing the template, I had spent one day on highlighting and summarising the paper.After getting this insight and understanding of the paper, I worked on the template with a nonlinear pattern, just as Faff (2015;2017) predicts.In some ways, Karas' paper is very explicit and straightforward such as the research question, the key papers, the motivation, the idea and the data.In other parts, I have to reread the paper to extract what's new, so what, and the contribution.Last, once I finish the template, I request the feedback from Dr. Mamiza and give a presentation regarding this pitch in a designated class for RBUS 6914.
With regard to the reverse engineered template, there are 11 parts that need to be filled by the pitcher.First is the full reference.Unlike the original research pitch, the title is the light task as the title has been provided by the published article.
Second is the basic research question.Karas' paper has mentioned the research question explicitly in the literature review part.Third is related to the three key papers.Karas et al. (2013) have identified and summarised literature and showed the research gap in the literature.However, I identify the three key papers of Karas' paper based on its analysis part.Karas et al. (2013) rely on Martinez-Peria and Schmukler (2001) and Demirguc-Kunt and Huizunga (2004) in analysing their work and mentioning several times these two papers not only in the literature review and data part but also in analysis part.In addition, they refer to Ioannidoi and de Dreu (2006) in building their research design and using the difference in differences method.Therefore, one should notice the consistency of the author in referring to particular paper as the key paper of reverse engineering pitch.The fourth is the motivation.Faff (2015;2017) explains the motivation as the "demand" side in addressing the research gap or the missing knowledge in the literature but it can be the real world phenomenon such as banking crises for Karas' paper.The four items (title, research question, key paper, and motivation) that I have been mentioned are the big picture of the pitching research in reverse engineering version.Good framing can be produced if we focus on these four items.
Next, we move to the basic "building blocks", which are captured by the acronym "IDioTs" (Idea, Data, and Tools).Fifth is the idea which is related to the strategy and the mechanism to get the answer to the research question.I have identified the core idea which drives the intellectual notion of Karas' paper.It is mentioned explicitly by Karas et al. (2013) that the core idea is to explore whether and how the introduction of explicit deposit insurance affects deposit flows and rates of banks of varying risk levels.However, I do not cover the central hypothesis and the theoretical tension in this part as it is not stated in the paper but it is better for another pitcher to identify both central hypothesis and theoretical tension in the quantitative empirical paper if it is possible.In terms of data, Karas et al. (2013) state the type of data, unit of analysis, a sample of the period, sampling interval and data sources clearly.However, they did not include any problems related to the data, therefore, I infer that they have no major problems regarding the data.Seventh is the tools, which is related to the basic empirical framework and research design.With regard to the research design, it is very clear the way they build up the design.However, they did not mention particular econometric software, so I infer particular software based on the standard econometrics software in the research.
Last, we have the most important parts of the pitch.They are two key questions (what's new and so what), one bottom line and three key findings.Eighth is the question of "what's new?" What's new is focusing on the novelty of the idea, data or tools.It can be defined as the supply side or the researcher's effort to create the new knowledge to meet the demand.The best novelty of the research is on the idea that Faff (2016;2017) argues that a simple diagram which called the "Mickey Mouse" can be helpful to portray the novelty of the research ideas.Here, the Mickey Mouse is the triple intersection of deposit insurance, market discipline, and banking crises.Ninth is the question of "so what?"This is one of the important sections in the template as if no one cares about the topic there is no reason to spend time and energy to work on the particular topic.Therefore, we can answer the "so what" question by identifying why is it important to know the answer and how will major decisions be influenced by the outcome of the research?In Karas' paper, the "so what" question is related to the policy maker such as the central bank and the Russian government.The tenth is the ultimate goal which is the primary contribution to the relevant literature that may relate to IDIOTs (Faff, 2016).Karas' paper is a finance paper in which in finance disciplinary, the methodologies may contribute significantly to the literature.Finance researchers compete to show that their methodologies have better outcomes and tackle particular issues such as endogeneity.Therefore, I infer that Karas et al. (2013)'s contribution lies in their efforts in enhancing the causality of the deposit insurance and market discipline in natural experiment setting.In addition to that, Karas et al. (2013) mention explicitly their contribution to the literature.Finally, the eleventh is related to the three key findings that have been extracted from the analysis and the conclusion part of the paper.

Conclusion
To conclude, the author has applied the pitching research (Faff, 2016) on the reverse engineering pitch in market discipline areas.I have shared my personal reflections with the template and contributed to the prior studies related to the pitching research exercise such as Dvoulety (2017) and Salehudin (2017).Generally, there are 11 items that need to be filled and completed by the pitcher.Before working on the template, the author collaborates with the advisor in choosing the key paper carefully as the work on the pitch will be the "brick" foundation on her PhD journey at the University of Queensland.I would recommend other beginner and early career researchers to apply pitching research on their topics as the pitching may speed up the work and provide systematic ideas.i Alon (2009) explains the two dimensions of problem choice.First is the feasibility that can be defined as the expected time to complete the project.In short, we need to find out whether a research problem can be hard or easy.Second is the interest, which is the increase in knowledge expected from the project.The best choice for research problem is when we have the optimum knowledge and difficulties using the Pareto principle.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Mickey Mouse Diagram Characterizing Novelty of the Research Idea 3. Personal reflection In my opinion, the pitching research developed by Faff (2016; 2017) can be a powerful tool for early career researcher and PhD students in exploring the new topic or in starting research journey.Based on my experience at Early Career Women's Pitch Day 2016 and RBUS 6914, I could use the pitching research for qualitative work such as Social Audit and quantitative empirical work such as Market Discipline.For me, the new topic can be a new headache.With regard to my decision to close my previous research journey, pitching research offers the acceleration in learning and grasping new areas.I suggest for the beginner researcher like me to build three types of the pitching research: the reverse engineering pitch of seminal paper, the reverse engineering pitch of the key paper, and a real pitch of your own research.This is the most comprehensive and the fastest way to build new research topic.