UPDATED Feb 26: All positions are now closed. Do not apply to any of the positions listed below. If additional positions open up then they will be posted in a new listing.
Research Opportunities Spring 2019
The following faculty members and PhD students are looking for research assistants this semester. All of these positions are for credit. Students registered for GU4996 will receive either 1 or 2 college credits and be charged for 1 – 2 credits (relevant only to students who pay by the credit). To participate in a faculty research project at no cost, GS students have the option of registering for GU4995 for 1 credit for which they will not be billed. In both cases, students will receive a letter grade on their transcript indicating that they worked as an RA. However, in the case of GU 4995, the 1 credit may not be used to fulfill the minimum credit limit of a Columbia degree. Research positions typically entail 5-7 hours of work per week. Research credit may not be used as a substitute for elective or seminar requirements in the major.
If interested in a position, please contact the researcher directly at the email address provided. If you are selected as the RA then contact me at se5@columbia.edu. Be sure to cc the person you will be working with on your email to me.
When contacting the researcher regarding a position, you should include a copy of your Columbia transcript (unofficial is ok) and a CV/resume.
Anjali Adukia (Professor, University of Chicago) and Alex Eble (Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University)
Education and Gender Bias
We are looking to hire a part-time research assistant for a research project on gender bias in education. One of the tasks will entail reading and parsing primary source documents and systematically recording relevant information. We are looking for a highly-motivated person who can work efficiently with close attention to detail. The ideal candidate would be able to follow instructions closely, while also being self-motivated and able to work independently. Experience analyzing primary source texts is a plus.
If you are interested in the position, please send the following materials to us at adukia@uchicago.edu and eble@tc.columbia.edu, with “RA application” in the subject title:
- A cover letter that briefly outlines: (a) your background and career ambitions, (b) your experience in conducting or assisting research projects, and (c) your experience analyzing primary texts and/or conducting text-based research, if applicable.
- A current resume.
- An unofficial transcript.
- A writing sample.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis starting February 1st. This position (and only this position) has the option of being a paid position (instead of academic credit). The pay would be $20 per hour for 5 hours of work per week.
*NEW* Sakshi Gupta (PhD Student) sg3511@columbia.edu
Laffer Curve Estimation
Estimating Laffer curve for alcohol tax in Kerala an Indian state. The RA would be data scraping excise tax and sales data for warehouses and retail shops from government department website. Convert .txt (or webpages) to .dat or .xls format.
*NEW* Tam Mai (PhD Student) ttm2119@columbia.edu
Education and Entrepreneurship: A Field Experiment in China
Business dynamics literature discovers that the rate of business startups and the pace of employment dynamism are crucial determinants of a country’s prosperity, which suggests that incentives for entrepreneurs to start new firms is a critical research question. Focusing on China, this project aims to test whether any information intervention tools exists to promote youth’s entrepreneurial awareness via a field experiment in the primary and middle schools.
The tasks of the RA include literature review and some basic data analysis. Chinese speaker preferred (but not required). Interest in education and/or entrepreneurship is a plus.
*NEW* Kyle Coombs (PhD student) kgc2127@columbia.edu
A Chilling Effect: Using Religious Scandals to test warm-glow hypotheses
The project looks at how giving to Catholic organizations changes after reports of scandals. Specifically, it explores if giving is more sensitive in areas with more charitable giving deductions relative to direct government grants to nonprofits.
The RA will catalog historical state level charitable giving deduction laws for all US states. Then they will estimate the charitable deductions at the state level using information on federal deductions. Calculations will require Stata (or R) skill.
*NEW* Dario Romero (PhD student) dr2879@columbia.edu
The Cotton Famine Effect on Catalan Textile Industry
Halon (2015) studied the effect of scarcity on the innovation behavior. He studies how the English cotton industries reacted to an exogenous scarcity produced by the American civil war. In this project I study the Catalan case and want to answer if the English reaction is unique and if the increase in innovation can be found in other countries with a smaller and emerging cotton industry. If it is not the case, then I am looking for the particularities that explain the absence of innovation.
The tasks will be mainly related with processing and organizing Spanish historical data such as historical economic census. The job requires knowledge of Spanish to read and understand historical archives from 19th century.
Serena Ng (Professor) sn2294@columbia.edu
Prof Ng is working on a data intensive project with Prof Simon Lee. Knowledge of STATA and R is essential.
Qingmin Liu (Professor) qingmin.liu@columbia.edu
Prof Liu is looking for someone to help prepare teaching materials and conduct literature review. The RA must know one of the latex-based typesetting programs (TeXworks, scientific workplace/word, etc.)
Belinda Archibong (Professor, Barnard) ba2207@columbia.edu
1. Colonialists, Taxation and Punishment: Prisons and Labor Coercion in British Colonial West Africa
We use historical datasets and exploit exogenous changes in commodity prices and labor tax and forced labor regulation from 1914 through 1940 to examine the relationship between labor coercion, colonial fiscal capacity and associated public works expenditures in British colonial West Africa.
Familiarity with Excel is needed. The project requires careful data entry skills and the ability to do basic exploratory data analysis
2.Firm Culture: Examining the Role of Ethnicity in Hiring Using Evidence from Nigeria
Africa is the world’s youngest continent, with 60\% of its population below the age of 25 by UN estimates. At the same time, youth unemployment is above 40\% in many countries. While a large literature links ethnic bias to inefficient economic outcomes across a range of contexts in Africa, we have limited understanding of its contribution to frictions in labor markets. We tackle two issues concurrently: high unemployment rates among youth and ethnic bias. Using an online job platform in Nigeria, we study ethnic bias in firm hiring with an audit study and a novel firm and applicant dataset.
Familiarity with Excel is needed. Familiarity with R or Stata is preferred. The project requires careful data entry skills and the ability to do basic exploratory data and statistical analysis.
3. Air Pollution from Gas Flaring and Cognitive Development in Children
We examine the impacts of air pollution from gas flaring on health and cognitive functioning in children. We also examine the impacts of environmental regulation on pollution outcomes.
Familiarity with Excel is needed. Familiarity with R or Stata is needed. Familiarity with GIS (ArcGIS or R) is preferred. The project requires careful data entry and cleaning skills and the ability to do basic exploratory data and statistical analysis.
Ye Zhang (PhD student) yz2865@columbia.edu
Startup Financing, Venture Capital and Bank Lending
This project studies the economic questions related to startup financing from both venture capital investors and bank lending. Another project also studies the impact of entrepreneurship on local economics. We use a unique and confidential database of U.S venture capital industry and another dataset of individual bank lending records in China to examine these interesting questions.
We will assign different RA tasks based on the background, preference and ability of our research assistants. The RA does not need to have all the skills mentioned below and we allow them to learn and accumulate the skills during the semester:
1. good English writing skills and reading ability (Data Entry, Collection, Literature Review)
2. Familiarity with Excel
3. Familiarity with R or Python or HTML (Data Analysis, Plot Graphs)
Being interesting and creative is a plus.
Cameron LaPoint (PhD student) cameron.lapoint@columbia.edu
Corporate Borrowing and Land Values in Real Estate Bubbles
Cameron LaPoint is looking for an RA with Japanese language skills to assist on a project examining the link between property values and corporate investment and borrowing behaviors during the 1980s real estate bubble in Japan. Applicants should anticipate devoting 5-7 hours per week towards creating a new dataset by reading financial disclosure documents and recording corporate balance sheet information and branch office locations. Japanese reading proficiency is required, and some knowledge of Stata or similar software is preferred.
The main tasks will involve querying a database to download financial disclosure documents, recording firm branch office addresses in Japanese from those documents, and matching these addresses to other geographic landmarks using Stata or other software.
Louise Guillouet (PhD student) lg2905@columbia.edu
Competition and quality in the retail sector
There are large inequalities in terms of food consumption in the US, which researchers have shown are due much more to disparities in preferences than to disparities in supply (“food deserts”). However, we also know preferences change over time: the rise of organic and other “healthy” food trends are an example of that. I want to investigate the impact of the entry of a high-quality chain store into a local market on the quality offered by incumbents in the retail grocery sector and the preferences of households.
The first task will be to gather data on opening dates and announcement dates of stores using ProQuest or Factiva. I have developed a protocol so there’s no particular skill besides being detail-oriented. Going forward I may need some support in python.
Paul Bouscasse (PhD student) paul.bouscasse@columbia.edu
Can Thou Beggar Thy Neighbour?
I study the 1930s devaluations, in their trade and monetary aspects. The research assistant would help me digitize, organize and analyze historical data on trade flows, tariff rates and prices.
No skill required. Familiarity with ABBY FineReader and Excel would be a plus, but both can be learned on the job.
Divya Singh (PhD student) ds3326@columbia.edu
Effect of Property Tax Exemption on Residential Market in NYC
It has been suggested that a solution to recent affordability crisis is to build more. For this reason, many cities exempt new residential from property taxes for a few years to stimulate residential investment. This project aims to calculate local incidence of one such exemption policy in New York City called 421a. It exploits variation in benefits of 421a over time and space to estimate effects of the tax exemption on rents and prices. The RA would be involved in measuring the revenue effects of this policy. We aim to scrape and analyze property tax bills filed by landlords in NYC over the past 10 years. The RA should be familiar with basic coding skills in Python or willing to learn with the project needs. The RA will be provided with a basic code to build upon.
Python useful for web-scraping and text analysis
Maggie Shi (PhD student) m.shi@columbia.edu
Financial Autonomy and Government Spending: Evidence from Italian Municipalities
This project looks at the relationship between financial autonomy of a local government entity (i.e., how much revenue the local government raises itself vs. how much it receives from the national government) and its spending behavior. While there are many theoretical models with predictions on financial autonomy and the efficiency of government spending, there is little empirical evidence. In this paper, we use detailed data on contracts signed by Italian municipalities and leverage a policy change affecting municipal financial autonomy to provide quasi-experimental on the relationship between autonomy and spending.
We are looking for an RA with to help us with machine learning, classification, and text analysis. Specifically, we need to classify contracts into categories. We are looking for people who have used (or want to learn how to use) random forest or neural networks. Coding experience is required, with a preference for experience in Python or R.
David Alfaro Serrano (PhD student) da2628@columbia.edu
The effect of innovation subsidies in Peru
Government subsidies to support firms’ innovation projects are a widespread policy tool. Are they an effective instrument to promote technological upgrading and to boost firm performance in developing countries? The aim of the project is to answer this question by studying the case of innovation subsidies in Peru.
Tasks will be mainly related with producing descriptive statistics and graphs, searching literature, and summarizing papers on the economics of firms, innovation, and trade.
The position requires:
– Working knowledge of Stata or R (manipulating variables, obtaining descriptive statistics, producing graphs and tables).
The following is not required, but will be considered a plus:
– Knowledge from courses on econometrics, trade, economic development, or public economics.
– Knowledge of web scrapping methods.
– Basic knowledge of Spanish (enough to read website menus and table headers).”
Yi Jie Gwee (PhD student) y.gwee@columbia.edu
The effect of legislation and/or legal rulings on urban development
I am currently exploring a series of empirical projects that examine how legislation and/or legal rulings affect urban development in various historical settings. These historical settings include 17th century London, 20th century US and countries that were formerly British colonies.
This position would be a good fit for someone who is enthused by the opportunity to construct new datasets from historical records. Careful data entry skills are needed as the RA will be asked to read historical documents and transcribe them into data. In addition, the RA would need to be comfortable with cleaning datasets and running simple regressions and analysis in Stata. The RA should also have a working knowledge of Excel.
Bhargav Gopal (PhD student) bg2600@columbia.edu
The impact of non-compete laws on wages, mobility, and innovation
I am a second year economics PhD student, and I am looking to collaborate with an undergraduate student looking to gain experience in building a project from the ground level. I am currently working on a project investigating the effect of non-compete clauses on worker mobility, productivity, and wages. It has been argued that Silicon Valley’s growth has partly been driven by California courts failing to enforce non-compete clauses, and I’d like to investigate if the data backs up this claim.
One of your responsibilities would be to assist in building a comprehensive database that tracks the enforcement of non-compete agreements in the US since 1990. In addition, you will be reading relevant published literature pertaining to labor economics topics, and summarizing the main results. Finally, we will also be collecting and analyzing wage data by state, so statistical programming skills (preferably in R) are very useful. If the project interests you, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at b.Gopal@columbia.edu!
Lorenzo Pessina (PhD student) l.pessina@columbia.edu
Tax Withholding and Firm Cash-Flows
This project tests for real effects of remittance responsibility on firms’ decisions, exploiting a reform to the collection of Value Added Tax (VAT) implemented in Italy in 2015. This reform does not change the VAT liability of firms, but it creates quasi-experimental variation in the timing of VAT remittance among government suppliers. Using novel administrative data from annual VAT returns, I documented that the shift in remittance responsibility caused a large increase in the credit position vis-Ã -vis the tax authority and a modest increase in sales and purchases, among treated firms. For the future, I plan to use additional data sources to explore whether the reform modified the composition of government suppliers.
Organize and prepare large datasets on firm-level financial information. Perform some textual analysis to match two datasets (prior knowledge of textual analysis is not required). In terms of programming languages, advanced knowledge of R (or Stata) is required. While the project exploits a reform in Italy, knowledge of Italian is not required.
