ALL Fall RA positions are now CLOSED.
Research Opportunities – Fall 2021
The following faculty members and PhD students are seeking research assistants this semester. All of these positions are for credit.
PLEASE NOTE: Research Credit (GU4996 and GU4995) is only available to Undergraduates (CC,GS,EN and BC) and MAO students in the Department of Economics.
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 additional 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 Cathy Scarillo at cs3899@columbia.edu to let her know who you will be working with, and be sure to cc the researcher and Prof. Susan Elmes (se5@columbia.edu) on your email.
3. You will then be sent a link to a specific RA form to fill out.
4. You will also need to also join the waitlist for the Research Course GU4996 in SSOL (or the optional GU4995 for GS students). PLEASE NOTE: After the Waitlists are closed, you will need to Petition to Add the course in SSOL.
Additional opportunities will be posted as they arise. Check the wiki page regularly for the latest ads.
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ALL Fall RA positions are now CLOSED. Please do NOT contact the researchers about these positions.
Bhargav Gopal (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
The Effects of Gender Quotas in the Corporate Boardroom
Despite the fact that women and men have similar educational attainment, there is a striking lack of female representation in corporate leadership positions. To ameliorate gender disparities in the corporate boardroom, California implemented a gender quota in 2017, mandating at least one woman on corporate boards. This project seeks to evaluate the characteristics of the quota appointed women and to determine the effects of the quota on firm bottom-line outcomes.
The RA position would involve comprehending recent published literature, so strong reading skills are ideal. The RA may also perform data calculations in a programming language such as R or Stata. Mostly importantly, I’m looking for an individual with a positive attitude and willingness to learn!
Jagdish Bhagwati (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Assistance with Book Manuscript
Seeking a bright undergraduate: no econometrics is involved, and the work would involve looking up sources (e.g. which year did Paul Samuelson go to Cambridge, UK, and meet with Pigou at King’s College?; the years when Pigou and Turing were Fellows of King’s College; Samuelson wrote how Turing gave him the mathematical proof of univalence wrt FPE theorem, etc).
Anyone who has an interest in these kinds of issues would be a good fit. The title of the book will be: A Magical Life: Eminent Economists I have Encountered. The undergraduate who assists me this year, like the one who assisted me a couple of years ago, will be given fulsome thanks in the Preface, of course.
No one who wants experience as an econometrician should apply, as they will be frustrated!
Miguel Urquiola (Professor, Dept. Chair) – POSITION CLOSED
Professor Miguel Urquiola is seeking one or more undergraduate RAs to help digitalize, process, and clean large-scale text datasets related to education and labor markets. Some basic statistical analysis will also be involved. The qualifications are: i) basic familiarity with data manipulation of strings or regular expressions, ii) attention to detail, iii) ability to work independently. Any previous programming experience (e.g., Stata, R, or Python) will be useful.
BooKang Seol (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Why Community-Driven Development (CDD) Projects Often Fail to Develop Social Institutions
Community-Driven Development (CDD) is a development practice that emphasizes community participation and control of development process. Numerous RCTs have consistently shown that CDD projects often fail to create lasting, structural social change at the community-level. Why do CDD projects often fail to establish lasting social institutions and have long-term effects on development outcomes? I study this question by comparing contemporary CDD with a series of CDD projects conducted in rural Korea in the 1970s.
Some knowledge of Korean is required.
Michael Best (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Fighting Corruption in Peru
Governments around the world rely on citizens to assist in the fight against corruption. Governments have limited capacity to monitor all aspects of government activity, and so citizens volunteering their information and their time can potentially drastically increase the arsenal at the government’s disposal. However, citizens have their own interests and may not possess the same training and capabilities as government workers. The Contraloría General de la Republica (CGR), the Peruvian government’s auditing agency, is the main organism undertaking large-scale actions to combat corruption. The CGR has been undergoing a massive reform focusing on strengthening its presence outside major cities and incorporating modern technologies in its auditing processes. In this effort, the CGR partnered with Columbia University and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to undertake and empirically evaluate the impact of two large-scale policy innovations. Our first project asks how best to delegate the monitoring of public works projects to citizens, accounting for heterogeneity in their motivations and their ability to perform complex audit-related tasks. Ultimately, though, only governments can investigate and sanction public officials, but they have limited resources at their disposal with which to do this. Therefore, governments need to process citizens’ reports of malfeasance and rank them by priority. However, when capacity to prioritize citizens’ reports is limited, this can lead government anti-corruption efforts to be misdirected. Our second project asks how technology can be leveraged to process large volumes of incoming citizen reports and triage them.
The Research Assistant will work closely with the Senior Research Assistants to:
- Assist in data cleaning and data analysis
- Assist in survey design and programming
- Assist in the creation of reports to government partners
- Assist in the preparation of literature reviews and qualitative research
- Assist in project related logistics tasks
- Perform other tasks assigned by the supervisors
The ideal candidate is an undergraduate student majoring in Economics or related fields with interest in early exposure to economics research and available to work for 15-20 hours a week for an amount of letter grade credits determined by the department during Fall 2021, with possibility of extension into Spring 2021.
Qualifications
- Strong oral and written Spanish communications skills
- Self-starter, resourceful and detail-oriented with excellent organizational skills
- Demonstrated ability to work independently
- Demonstrated ability to work successfully handling various tasks
- Eager to learn, and gain experience
- Familiarity with randomized controlled trials is a plus
- Prior knowledge of quantitative data analysis packages is a plus (ideally Stata)
- Knowledge of the Peruvian context is preferred
Dario Romero (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Every Cloud has a Silver Lining: The Effect of Cotton Crisis on Spanish XIXth Century Textile Industry
Cotton global markets were disrupted by the American Civil War. Industrialists all around the globe reacted differently to this new reality. This project aims to evaluate how Spanish reacted to disruption. The hypothesis is that they chose a middle way between the technology improvement and lobby for government help
The RA will have to digitalize and process data coming from historical archives. RA should be able to read in Spanish. After finishing, this RA must analyze the data, generating graphs and some statistical analysis. Knowledge of econometrics and some package is desired.
Jose Scheinkman (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Optimal Conservation of the Amazon Forest
We are using empirical estimates concerning the effect of the replacement of the forest by agriculture on net carbon capture to construct a dynamic model that allows for the examination of optimal conservation policies.
Need RA with computational skills in solving, numerically, systems of equations with large number of unknowns.
Pietro Tebaldi (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
1) Analyzing Competition in Health Insurance Markets
The project uses recent data from health insurance markets in the US to analyze competition and the design of regulatory interventions. The main focus will be on the effect of the Affordable Care Act and on the analysis of alternative policies.
The student will combine and summarize data, prepare regression output, and illustrate main results.
Stata or R required. Python can be useful.
2) On the Adoption of Electric Vehicles and Low Emission Vehicles
The project is a large-scale empirical project joint with faculty at the University of Chicago. Using Texas DMV data we aim to document and analyze the preferences for electric vehicles and low-emission vehicles. The ultimate goal is to answer questions on what are the determinants and mechanisms behind the adoption of vehicles that have a lower environmental externality.
The RA will clean, explore, and analyze the data. Knowledge of Python is required.
Louise Guillouet (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Trade and consumer learning in Mexico
In this project, I investigate one strategy for firm-level growth: product scope expansion, and examine what barriers exist for Mexican SMEs to adopt this strategy. One possible barrier is that firms have weak and/or low reputations, which prevent potential customers from trying the new goods Mexican SMEs are introducing. In order to prove this, I need to show that this is not due to quality, and ideally that a quasi-random change in reputation of Mexican firms increases the success of their new products.
I would need someone to clean data (strings). I mostly use Stata but I’m open to any software. I would also need someone who speaks Spanish to help me sift through recent changes of the Mexican regulation on food standards and labels.
Naman Garg (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Fake News and Fact-Checking
The project aims to evaluate the effect of corrective information (fact-checks) on people’s misperceptions. Focus is fake news spread on WhatsApp in India.
The main task consists of literature review. In addition it may also involve 1) data cleaning and analysis may also be required in Stata or R, and 2) help in preparing survey instruments for the study in qualtrics.
Michelle Jiang (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Labor Search Behavior of Graduating Seniors
Wage gaps across race and gender persist among equally educated individuals, and have been attributed in significant part to differences in behavior during job search (Patten 2016; Blau and Kahn 2017; Cortes, Pan, Pilossoph and Zafar 2021). Behavioral adaptions of labor search theory suggest that if information about the labor market differs across groups, either in quantity or quality, this can lead to differences in job choice (Cox and Oaxaca 2000). This project will explore this hypothesis.
RA should have taken microeconomics and econometrics, and know how to use Stata. The project focuses on the intersection of behavioral/experimental economics with labor economics.
Suresh Naidu (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Entering historical NAACP data
We have records of NAACP county level membership from historical documents. We need these entered.
Essentially just excel, so good for freshmen or those looking to just get started on research.
Elliot Lipnowski (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Computing Rationalizable Outcomes in Multistage Games
This project will focus on the game theoretic solution concept of extensive-form rationalizability (EFR). EFR seeks to describe the strategic implications of players in a game being sophisticated and reasoning about others being sophisiticated. Although conceptually appealing, EFR has suffered from limited application because actually computing EFR outcomes is difficult beyond very simple games. The goal of this project is to offer new tools to compute EFR outcomes.
The main task, at least initially, is to synthesize the existing literature on EFR computation. The RA would be expected to summarize the results of a given list of papers, and any other very relevant papers that come up in the process of going through the former. Part of the job of summarizing these papers is to write up their results in a common notation and exposit proofs of their main results. The main required skill set is comfort with proof-based mathematics: a first course in real analysis and a first course in probability would suffice. Some familiarity with game theory is a plus, though not required.
Kosha Modi (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Corporate Debt Statistics
An analysis of US corporate debt by exploring different papers and datasets.
Basic programming skills and reading of different papers
Krzysztof Zaremba (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Tourism and infectious diseases
The project aims to assess whether touristic movements contribute to the diffusion of infectious diseases (Covid and Flu). In particular, it analyzes the opening of hotels and school recess schedule (in Poland) to evaluate human mobility and subsequent spread of viral infections. I work with Facebook data on social mobility and with administrative data for health outcomes.
RA tasks would be mostly related to gathering, managing and visualizing data. The tasks would be performed in R language, so either basic coding skills or willingness to learn R is required. Main goal would be to create an interactive (Shiny) dashboard visualizing health outcomes to facilitate the analysis of the policy. You will learn data visualization techniques and how to build a shiny dashboard. Knowledge of Polish is not required (but welcome!)
Joana Duran Franch (Postdoc) – POSITION CLOSED
Labor Market Polarization and the Adoption of Family-Friendly Policies
The US labor market is polarizing. While manufacturing jobs, at the middle of the skills distribution, are losing employment; jobs in the lower and the higher end of the skills distribution are gaining it. Low-educated individuals are negatively affected by these changes. With little access to the jobs at the high-end of the skills distribution (due to education and skills requirements), individuals with at most a high-school degree compete for the jobs available at the lower end of the skills distribution. Having a readily available supply of labor for jobs at the lower end of the skills distribution might have contributed to the lack of support to family friendly policies in the United States, which otherwise would have been necessary to increase the labor supply. This paper will exploit variation across US states to understand whether and to what extent that’s the case.
The RA will devote their time to collect relevant data for the analysis. More specifically, they will:
- Collect information about the support / adoption of family friendly policies (childcare subsidies, parental leave, financial support to families with young kids, …) across U.S. states from several sources (opinion surveys, the adoption of actual policies, relevant literature, …)
- Construct indexes to rank U.S. states in this regard.
No specific software skills are required.
Seung-hun Lee (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Impact of mayor assassinations in Mexico on local state capacity
The project aims to use the assassination of mayors in Mexico as a natural experiment to determine whether the loss of a mayor affects local economic attainment and the functioning of a city government. Specifically, the project intends to compare between municipalities in Mexico whose mayors were killed and those whose mayors were targeted but survived. The main goal is to assess how the assassinations affect local public finance (tax revenues and expenditures), quality of personnel in decision-making positions, and economic activities of citizens. In addition, the project aims to track whether and how the affected municipalities in Mexico recover from these events.
The prospective RA is expected to browse through Mexican newspapers, dating from early 2000s to 2021, in order to determine the roster of mayors/local politicians have been targeted and/or murdered. Thus, the RA candidate should have: Language requirement: Fluency in Spanish and familiarity with politics in Mexico. This is a required skill. Programming: Text-scraping skills (python or equivalent) would be ideal, although this is not required. If time permits, the list of targeted mayors will be merged with other datasets, thus skills in STATA would be welcome (but this one is optional).
David Weinstein (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
From Malthus to Miracle: The Sources of Japanese Industrialization
Our research is aimed at understanding why Japan was the first non-Western to industrialize. We are building a rich dataset of 19th century trade patterns, British patents, educational levels, foreign advisors, rail networks, and coal production to understand how Japan was able to absorb foreign technology. Our hope is to identify important lessons for other developing countries.
One part of this project involves estimating Japanese productivity from its trade patterns relative to those of other countries. Currently, we have nineteenth century trade patterns for Japan, Belgium, and Germany, but we would like to add U.S. data to the set of countries. While the U.S. data has already been digitized so data entry is not a part of the project, we need to concord the U.S. data with the Standard Industrial Trade Classification (SITC) system. This will require carefully reading U.S. categories and identifying which categories match to the SITC categories. Technical skills are not required, but attention to detail is a must. Researchers will work in teams with Professors Reka Juhasz and David Weinstein.
Jeffrey Sachs (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
The World in 2050
This project aims to create models of global and national change — economic, demographic, technological, and environmental — between now and 2050. The purpose is to help design policy and investment pathways to sustainable development. The RA will learn techniques in economic modeling, statistics, and data management.
Good ability to manage spreadsheets, basic statistics, and basic microeconomic and macroeconomic concepts. Interest in long-term economic change and sustainable development.
