There are two reasons I chose Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Unicatt): the first one is my supervisor Professor Matsuda knows Professor Giuseppe Arbia, who is a famous researcher in the field of spatial econometrics, and suggested that it would be a great chance to learn from him; the second one is that I attended the summer school organized by Spatial Econometrics Association in 2018, which is held in the Unicatt Rome campus, the place where Professor Arbia works. The preparation went a bit differently that I imagined. Since I was too late to apply for the exchange program in my department, I went for the COLABS program. Our international office helped me communicating and preparing the paperwork with Unicatt, but due to the insufficient time my departure was delayed from September to October. Educatt, the NPO that provides a number of services for Unicatt students, helped me with my accommodation in Rome. It was a student dorm run by church at a reasonable price.

Living in a foreign country for years did help me adapt to my new life in Rome. The Mediterranean climate was quite pleasing, temperature never changed rapidly, and winter was quite warm. Traffic was not very good, which needed to be taken into account. It seems most people in Rome does not speak English (even university students were not that good on average), which did make things hard for me time to time, but they were quite friendly and we usually could figure things out with some help of modern technology.

The Rome campus did not have PhD course for economics, and most of the students were in the medical school. Though my focus was the joint research, I attended two courses, one was applied statistics for foreign undergraduate students, the other one was statistics for medical students given by Professor William Greene from the US. The former course reminded me of some basics, and I helped other students with the course; the latter one offered some interesting insights from Professor Greene.

My main purpose is to finish the joint research with Professor Arbia. We usually had discussions on our progress once per week since he is quite busy, especially for the first half of my stay because he needed to teach in Milan two days per week. Unfortunately, my stay was cut short by the COVID outbreak, and we continued our work remotely.

We have mostly finished our joint research on the topic of the potential bias when estimating spatial econometric models with sample data. The theoretical part is mostly done by Professor Arbia, the simulation verifying our discovery is conducted by me, and a Bayesian strategy for bias reduction is developed by Professor Matsuda and me. We expect the writing to be finished soon.

This was my first time staying in Europe for an extend period of time. Apart from the language barrier (if I was staying longer I would consider learning some Italian), most part of the life there did not feel too different, which was a bit surprising at first. But there were definitely unique experiences, like the welcoming event in the dorm (although half of that was a religious ceremony I didn’t quite understand), the passion of various shop owners, the magnificent historical sites, to be remembered.