The first few years Belinda Román participated in the Wall Street Journal’s annual economic forecasting contest, there was no official winner.
“They suspended who’s the most accurate forecaster because we were in Covid — everything was so volatile that it was hard to gauge,” said Román, associate professor of economics at St. Mary’s University.
This year, the Journal was back on track and named Román the victor.
She beat out 71 other business, academic and financial economists by ranking closest to the actual values reported at year’s end by the federal government.
For instance, Román’s forecast of 2.8% growth in the gross domestic product for 2023 — based on the inflation-adjusted change in the fourth quarter from a year earlier — was closest among economists to the 3.1% reported by the U.S. Department of Commerce in January.
Others predicted “anemic growth and unemployment above 4%,” reported the Journal. Not Román.
Her forecast for the 2023 economy overall trended more positive than some of her peers, expecting much stronger economic growth and job gains than the consensus.
Though the Journal made the most of the fact that the top forecaster “hailed not from a big financial house but rather a small, Catholic liberal-arts university in Texas,” it was precisely her vantage point that tipped her in the right direction.
“When you do these really big aggregates of the whole United States, sometimes if there’s a drag in California or in New York … you tend to overemphasize that and not recognize what’s going on inside that big story,” Román said.
“So I think one of the reasons I was a bit more positive is I could see the buoyancy in Austin and Dallas and San Antonio and all these other cities inside the United States, and I tried to capture that.”
Román grew up in El Paso and entered Texas Christian University (TCU) as a pre-medical major with plans to be a physician like her father. “I found that I had more affinity with the social sciences and with economics,” she said.
She went to work in Washington, D.C., and learned she had a lot still to learn.
Román returned to TCU, got her master’s degree, then took a federal government job in El Paso working on border and immigration analyses.
That position also showed Román she needed more technical skills. “I need to better understand what these engineers are saying to me or the environmentalists are saying to me,” Román said.
She moved to London, attending the London School of Economics, “and that just kind of opened every door.” Román also earned a doctorate from the University of Western Ontario in Canada.
Her next stop was Palo Alto College in San Antonio. Román had always wanted to teach, but first wanted to gain real-world experience. “I needed to be able to say I’ve been in the working world. I’ve been in the private sector. I’ve been in the public sector.”
After teaching economics at Palo Alto for 17 years, Román joined the faculty at St. Mary’s as an adjunct professor. Five years in, she became a full-time professor and has been at the university for about 13 years.
Román teaches courses in microeconomics, macroeconomics, international economics, and sometimes special topics such as health care or labor. She also does some consulting to keep up her skills.
Román has reflected on how she outsmarted so many other economists during a particularly turbulent year. To her, it’s not a contest.
“The project is to look at the economy and say, where do we think it’s going, and use our professional skills and training to think through what’s happening in the economy,” she said. “I try not to get caught up in all that competition.”
While it’s great to be recognized, she didn’t set out to be number 1, she said. “I did it because I want to be faithful to what’s going on in the economy.”
San Antonio, however, does not get the recognition the city deserves when it comes to economic forecasting at the national level. There’s economic growth in San Antonio and that’s what made Román’s forecast more bullish than perhaps others.
Some think of Austin as the economic model for Texas, or places in California, she said. “But I think those are really the outliers.”
The political environment is what makes conditions for this year hard to predict, she told the Journal.
For San Antonio, threats to the economy include U.S.-Mexico border and immigration issues that could affect trade and mass public school closings. Those issues are pushing Román to soften the outlook for San Antonio in 2024, though she remains optimistic.
Economic growth can be a “happy story” for San Antonio, she said, unless that growth is not equitable and leads to high poverty rates.
“That means there’s an equity issue in terms of how that benefit is being distributed,” Román said. “Unbalanced growth can be detrimental even though you have growth. It could be detrimental as a whole.”
The attention brought by the Journal’s story in recent weeks is finally subsiding. She said it has been good for the university and exciting for her students whom she hopes to inspire in the same way she was over the years.
“My role models have been a number of different people in different fields,” she said. “But they all are aspiring to better understand and to help, to use their logic and their skills in the service of helping.”
