PLEASE NOTE: All RA Positions for Spring 2021 are now CLOSED.
Research Opportunities Spring 2021
The following faculty members and PhD students are still seeking research assistants this semester. All of these positions are for credit.
Selected RAs will need to register for a Research Course. Students registered for research course GU4996 will receive either 1 or 2 college credits and be charged for 1 or 2 credits (relevant only to students who pay by the credit). GS students have the option of participating in a research project at no cost by instead registering for GU4995 for 1 credit, for which they will not be billed. However, in the case of GU4995, the 1 credit may not be used to fulfill the minimum credit limit of a Columbia degree.
In both cases, students will receive a letter grade on their transcript for their work as an RA. However, in either case, research credit may not be used as a substitute for elective or seminar requirements in the major.
If interested in an RA position, please do the following:
1) Contact the researcher directly at the email address provided, and include a copy of your Columbia transcript (unofficial is ok) as well as your CV/resume.
If you are selected as an RA by the researcher, continue with the additional steps below:
2) Contact Prof. Susan Elmes at se5@columbia.edu to let her know who you will be working with, and be sure to cc the researcher on your email.
3) Once confirmed, you will be sent a link to a specific RA form to fill out.
4) You will then need to also join the waitlist for the Research Course GU4996 (or the optional GU4995 for GS students).
Additional opportunities will be posted as they arise. Check the wiki page regularly for the latest ads.
PLEASE NOTE: All RA Positions for Spring 2021 are now CLOSED.
Please do NOT contact the researchers about these positions.
Shruti Mishra (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Flattening of the Phillips curve: Significance of small firms
Econometric studies have found that the price Phillips Curve flattens, but the wage Phillips Curve persists. This puzzle can be explained by the presence of small firms that employ a large fraction of the population, but do not produce much output. In this paper we develop a quantitative model of this mechanism and then discipline it with the firm-level price data from ACNielsen Retail Scanner database.
Data cleaning (Nielsen data) using STATA
Charles Taylor (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Deadzone Agriculture: Satellites, Algal Blooms, and the Social Cost of Fertilizer
Fertilizer is critical to agricultural productivity, but its use results in negative externalities downstream in the form of hypoxic zones and harmful algal blooms. The EPA considers this nutrient pollution one of the “most widespread, costly and challenging environmental problems.” Despite this, the economic cost of fertilizer has yet to be quantified at a large-scale due to the lack of a widespread and temporally consistent dataset on algal blooms. This study utilizes a satellite-derived measure of water quality that spans three decades to document the relationship between fertilizer and algal blooms, and the resulting economic impacts in the US. An extension of this project involves the construction of several satellite-derived water quality measures aggregated for regions in the US, EU, Brazil, China. Utilizing Google Earth Engine, we will apply existing algorithms from the literature, as well as create our own using machine learning techniques. This project will help answer key questions about agriculture, ecosystem service valuation, industrial pollution, and water quality legislation.
Must have skills: data cleaning and compiling; strong analytic and statistical skills; literature review of technical research. Nice-to-have: experience in R; remote sensing/satellite familiarity; machine learning; econometrics; Google Earth Engine.
BooKang Seol (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Community-Driven Development: why does it fail to create social capital?
Why do Community-Driven Development (CDD) projects fail to establish lasting social institutions and have long-term effects on key development outcomes? In this paper, I investigate the exact mechanisms that turn local infrastructure projects into springboards for further development through the lens of the CDD projects implemented in rural Korea in the 1970s.
Ability to read and write in Korean is required.
Dian Jiao (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Assortative Matching and Quality Upgrading
This paper aims to explore the assortative matching on the firm side: whether larger or more productive firms will prefer imported inputs to domestic ones. It also explores the effect of input trade liberalization on markup dispersion and quality upgrading in India.
Collect and clean trade data on non-tariff import barriers. Merge with compiled cross-sectional survey data. Use Latex to prepare graphs and tables to portray results. Write short research summary to help present findings. Work at least 8 hours per week.
Florian Grosset (PhD Student – POSITION CLOSED
1) The Unemployment Trap: Women’s Labor Supply Complementarities in Côte d’Ivoire
Are individuals more likely to take-up a job offer, retain that job, and be productive, if their family and friends are also working? Why is it so? We construct an explicit test for this hypothesis, through a large-scale hiring experiment implemented with an agro-processing company in Côte d’Ivoire.
The RA would primarily be responsible for conducting detailed literature reviews on labor supply complementarities and their potential mechanisms (i.e., whether people working together with friends and family members are more likely to take-up a job offer, retain the job, and be more productive — and why). This would entail an extensive exploration of the scientific literature in the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Working knowledge of French (especially reading) would be a plus since the project is implemented in a French-speaking country (Côte d’Ivoire), but not required. Depending on Stata proficiency, the RA could also have the opportunity to engage in data cleaning and analysis.
2) Widespread Misperceptions and Entrepreneurship
Preliminary survey evidence from Côte d’Ivoire indicates that individuals tend to widely underestimate the work activities and earnings of their family members and friends. How can it be the case? What are the consequences, notably in terms of entrepreneurship? This project aims to address some of these questions through a field experiment.
The RA would primarily be responsible for conducting literature reviews on a series of topics related to the project. They would range from behavioral economics and psychology (specifically, work related to “selection neglect”) to entrepreneurship (specifically, evaluations of interventions designed to create an “entrepreneurship culture”), through information interventions (specifically, which information interventions seem to affect real outcomes and which ones don’t). The RA could also support the development of survey instruments and the preparation of upcoming fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire. Working knowledge of French would be a strong plus for those activities, though not a requirement. Depending on the RA interest and proficiency with Stata, some data cleaning and analysis could also be performed.
Louise Guillouet (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Evaluating a novel approach for expanding the pool of entrepreneurs creating SGBs in South-East Asia
The goal of this project is to test whether a mostly psychological intervention based on the concept of the growth mindset (Dweck 2015) can help entrepreneurs in South-East Asia believe in their ability to grow, acquire the skills they need to do so, and ultimately grow their business. We are currently conducting a survey of experienced entrepreneurs in Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand in order to understand the drivers behind entrepreneurial success there, in terms of psychology, education, experience and specific training. Then, we will build on the results of the survey and will use focus groups to adapt the growth mindset intervention of Yeager et al. (2016) to the context of entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia. We will end the project by running a beta test of the intervention with early-stage entrepreneurs, validating the proof of concept for a future evaluation.
We would like to hire RAs who speak either Thai, Khmer or Cambodian to help us roll out the survey and more importantly conduct the focus groups with entrepreneurs speaking these languages. The RA’s tasks will be translation, coordination with different stakeholders and the survey takers, and animation of the (remote) focus groups with entrepreneurs. We are looking for someone who is motivated by the project, speaks one of the relevant languages, and has experience working with entrepreneurs in South-East Asia. Experience with Stata, Qualtrics (or javascript), WordPress a plus!
Bhargav Gopal (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
The Effect of Affirmative Action in Corporate Boardrooms
Despite the fact that women and minorities are qualified, corporate boardrooms exhibit a striking lack of diversity — a reflection of the so called “glass ceiling.” This project assesses the effects of a recent policy in California that mandates at least 1 woman and minority be on a corporate board. We will determine whether firms adequately complied with the legislation, and whether the quota benefitted diverse senior level management who were not directly affected by the quota.
Brief description of the tasks of the RA, as well as any special skills that you are looking for (e.g. language skill, programming skill etc) *
Critical thinking skills, a positive work ethic, and familiarity with statistical programming (in R or Stata)
Qingmin Liu (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Research Assistants in Game Theory
Review and write summaries of game theory papers; proofread latest research in game theory.
Students should have know basic game theory and are familiar with one of the latex based typesetting programs.
Kyle Coombs (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Labor Supply Responses to Discrimination
This project analyzes the ways that people try to strategically avoid or overcome discrimination in the labor market. It relies on a descriptive portion, which I am developing to motivate two experiments that I hope to start by next academic year if not sooner. The first experiment looks at how people respond to job postings on the internet by choosing to or not to apply. The second experiment looks at how people respond to perceived discrimination on the labor market by changing their digital identity and how that maps to job outcomes.
Python, Stata, R, willingness to pick up new programming tools as needed.
Claire Palandri (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Human health consequences of industrial animal production
Industrial animal production operations have been associated with deleterious health conditions (from gastrointestinal illnesses to increased risk of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections) in the U.S. As the number of intensive industrial facilities keeps increasing, making the issue increasingly dire, this project goes beyond documenting association to estimating the causal impact of such operations on neighboring communities.
The RA must be proficient in R, in order to perform data wrangling tasks to prepare data from various sources for subsequent econometrics analysis.
Guy Aridor (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Measuring Competition in the Attention Economy: Evidence from Social Media
This project aims to understand competition between prominent social media platforms. In order to do so, I comprehensively track the time that subjects spend on social media via a mix of parental control software and weekly surveys. I restrict subjects’ access to social media over time (i.e. restricting Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) to understand how they substitute their time and make use of the various applications.
I am mainly looking for help administering the field experiment, which primarily makes use of parental control software. This will be a combination of working with Selenium in Python, a tool that I use to do web scraping of time usage reported on the parental control applications, as well as involve emailing and texting (via software) with subjects when the software breaks down or if subjects inquire with questions. Smaller tasks might include helping with building a time tracking application in Google Chrome and in R assisting with cleaning data, but these will be only a small portion of the time.
Krzysztof Zaremba (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
In utero impact of sexually transmitted diseases
This project explores the impact of prenatal exposure to sexually transmitted diseases on adult outcomes. Firstly, I am using military service during WW1/WW2 as an event increasing the risk of getting an STD. Secondly, I will analyze the educational and labor market outcomes of children born in counties with a high number of war veterans.
Skill 1: Excel – using archival data, the student will help me to create a dataset describing participation in WW1/WW2 and the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases. Skill 2: R. (optional) – student will help me clean and analyze the data. That would involve create maps and interactive charts (I would help student to develop skills necessary for that). Skill 3: Polish language (optional) – if available, the student would help me collect data on covid-19 and on implementation on local lockdowns in Poland. Then, student would help to analyze this data to see the impact of lockdown on mobility (data from Facebook) and infections.
Yining Zhu (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Police leniency and its racial gap
This project looks at factors that could affect police officer’s leniency to test what polices may help reduce racial gap in policing outcomes.
Collecting and cleaning data – background research – gis and stata skills preferred
David Rosenkranz (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Regulation of US Dialysis Markets
The aim of this project is to study government oversight of capital investments by health care providers. The project focuses on dialysis, a treatment for kidney disease.
An RA may assist with one of several tasks. First, an RA who is comfortable with Stata or interested in improving their data skills may assist with an empirical analysis by performing a data entry task, assisting in the preparation of a Stata program, and assisting in the preparation of graphical visualizations of their results. Second, an RA who is comfortable writing or interested in improving their writing may assist with a review and summary of legal statutes.
Tatyana Avilova (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Prescription drug monitoring programs and the United States opioid epidemic
As the opioid epidemic has killed more than 400,000 people in the United States, state governments have implemented various policies with the goal of reducing opioid prescriptions and, subsequently, opioid-related mortality. This project examines the impact of one such set of policies, prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs), and how prescriptions and mortality in a given state are affected by PDMP implementation and policies in its neighboring states.
Some RA tasks for this project will include: (1) collecting information on prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) from legislative and regulatory documents; (2) reading and summarizing existing literature on PDMPs and the opioid epidemic; (3) analyzing empirical data available in online databases. The RA must be comfortable parsing through long documents and large amounts of material in English to extract key information. Proficiency with Excel or a similar spreadsheet program is required; some experience with Stata is preferred but not required.
