Research Opportunities – Spring 2024
All Spring RA positions are now CLOSED.
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 those chosen credits (relevant only to students who pay by the credit). GS (General Studies) 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 requirement 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.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Students can only register for one Research project for credit. A 2nd project can be worked on for the experience only, and without credit.
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 cc the researcher 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 join the waitlist for the Research Course GU4996 in SSOL (or the optional GU4995 for GS students only). PLEASE NOTE: After the Waitlists close, you will need to Request to Add the course in SSOL.
________________________________________________________________________
All Spring RA positions are now CLOSED. Please do NOT contact the researchers about these positions.
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 can potentially drastically increase the arsenal at the government’s disposal. 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 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. Peruvian civil society is tremendously active in denouncing corruption. CGR has a well-established system to receive citizens’ whistleblower complaints, and a dedicated team that processes them and decides how to act on the allegations. However, the team is relatively small and there is an expanding backlog of cases to process. Our 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 Principal Investigator(s) and Senior Research Assistant(s) to:
- Read the whistleblower reports for cases where the citizen is accusing a municipality board and read the text to see whether it’s the mayor who’s being accused – 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 5-7 hours a week for an amount of letter grade credits determined by the department during Spring 2024.
Qualifications:
- Advanced level Spanish (Native speaker preferred) – 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.
- Knowledge of the Peruvian context is preferred.
Akanksha Vardani (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Political Connections and Property Taxation
This project is joint work with another PhD student, Aneesha Parvathaneni (aneeshap@umich.edu). We study property tax paying behavior of citizens who are connected to local political leaders at the rural level in India. Using administrative property tax dataset, spatial dataset and data on Gram Panchayat (Indian rural local bodies) elections, we aim to study two types of political connections – i) those who share the same last name as the local leader and ii) those who are geographically proximate to the local leader.
The RA will primarily be tasked with exploring the spatial datasets and matching the spatial dataset with the property tax dataset and election dataset. We would ideally meet once every week with semi-regular informal communication between meetings, e.g. using slack or email for clarification or to troubleshoot any coding issues that you may run into. Prior experience with R is required. Experience with STATA is a plus. Being able to read devanagari script (Hindi or Marathi) is a must. This is a great opportunity for those interested in gaining experience in R using spatial data. Potential applicants can reach out to us with any questions.
Tushar Kundu (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
1) Improving student human capital gains through parent-teacher communication: evidence from India
I study the potential of enhancing parent-teacher communication to improve the development of student well-being by focusing on a more holistic view of human capital. I study the hypothesis that discrepancies in the prioritization of social and emotional development between parents and teachers may lead to inefficient allocation of teacher effort. Specifically, I propose an intervention where information on parent preferences regarding the relative importance of various human capital dimensions is systematically provided to teachers. This study will be carried out in elementary and middle school classrooms in India.
Desired skills: Data analysis and manipulation (R or Python preferred, Stata acceptable) Potential tasks include : Assisting in administration of the intervention (working with educators and parents in India) Conducting thorough literature reviews that complement the project aims Engaging in data cleaning and analysis For those with a background or interest in computer science, there is an opportunity to support the creation and improvement of an informational website essential to the intervention.
2) Marriage Transfers and Signaling in Female Education
This project is joint work with another PhD student, Akanksha Vardani (av2906). We study the role of labor market and marriage market considerations in motivating investment in female education. We consider increases to access to education, and allow shifts in educational attainment to vary based on marriage payment norms. We find that shifts are attenuated among populations that practice marriage payments. In the coming semester, we hope to clean additional data to incorporate and build on these findings.
The RA will primarily be tasked with exploring and processing a large repository of survey data from India to evaluate their relevance to our projects. We would ideally meet at least once every two weeks with semi-regular informal communication between meetings, e.g. using Slack for clarification or to troubleshoot coding issues you may (i.e., will) run into. Prior experience with a programming language is of course preferred—especially R—but more important is that the RA be very organized. Depending on progress and interest, the RA may also be assigned tasks for other projects broadly in the spheres of applied micro or enviro. Potential applicants are encouraged to reach out with any questions. If applying, please include your availability on Mondays this semester (not set in stone but most convenient for us).
Dian Jiao (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Land Market Constraints and Structural Transformation: Policy Implications Under India’s ULCRA
This study examines the impact of the 1999 repeal of India’s Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act (ULCRA) on firm growth and structural transformation. We are developing a general equilibrium model to understand firm dynamics.
Proficient in using STATA and MATLAB. Knowledge about structural estimation is a plus.
Kamelia Stavreva (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Private supervision in Florida
This project will examine the impact of the rollout of private supervision in Florida. Using Florida court data and FOIAs data regarding Florida contracts with private companies it will examine the impacts of using private supervision on recidivism outcomes expanding to other outcomes in the future.
I would be looking for an RA who is skilled at online research and has some knowledge of STATA.
Nicolas Longuet-Marx (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Party Lines or Voter Preferences? Explaining Political Realignment
This project studies the shift of blue-collar voters away from the Democratic Party. Democrats are now consistently winning in educated, cosmopolitan cities but have lost their grip on the post-industrial areas that used to constitute the Blue Wall. How can we explain this political realignment? Did left-wing parties decide to move away from working class voters to focus on the educated elite by offering different types of policies? Or, on the contrary, is the working class seeking out policies that are different from those it looked for in the 1970s? This project disentangles supply and demand effects in the political realignment, using tools from Natural Language Processing with very fine-grained election data in a well-tested demand model.
The RA will help in the data collection and data processing of electoral results for most recent elections. Depending on their skills, the RA will also help in the scraping and processing of political candidate websites. Knowledge of Stata is required, knowledge of Python would be an advantage.
Donato Onorato (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
1) Skin Tone Discrimination in 20th Century
This project is interested in understanding how a person’s skin color affected their economic and social outcomes, how skin color interacted with race, ethnicity, and racial classification throughout the 20th century, and how observed differences in outcomes between individuals with different skin color are related to contemporaneous discrimination and intergenerational transmission through parental endowments. The goals of the project will be to create descriptive statistics about skin tone discrimination during the 20th century and to estimate the casual effect of having a given perceived skin tone on various economic and social outcomes.
RAs will play an important role in creating the dataset for the analysis. The data for the project comes from digitized historical records. The RAs will primarily assist in developing a method to extract information from these cards at scale using modern machine learning, computer vision, and OCR methods. They may also assist with some preliminary analysis of the data. The methodology used is mostly up to the RA and this will be a collaborative effort between the RA and the PI. Qualified applications should have skills or experience related to machine learning and programming.
2) The Nature of Firm Lobbying
The lobbying industry in the United States is large, and the origin of these lobbying revenues are often firms and industry-associations. Given the size of the lobbying industry, one immediately wonders whether lobbying is distortionary. This project aims to use historical data from lobbying report in post-war (1946-54) US along with recent advances in natural language processing to classify lobbying activities into those related to general, productivity-enhancing policy versus specific, rent-seeking activities.
RAs will serve a crucial role in creating the dataset of lobbying report information. Lobbying records exist in pdf format and the RA will use OCR and other machine learning tools to extract relevant data to be used for analysis. The methodology used is up to the RA, but qualified applicants will have skills in machine learning and programming.
Palaash Bhargava (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Popularity, Social Networks and Student Outcomes
Behavioral traits and access to social networks start impacting the outcomes of individuals from an early age. Further, these two aspects often influence each other in many different ways. This project is a large scale RCT that seeks to explore the interplay between personality skills, classroom experiences and the position of individuals in their respective social networks in Indian primary and middle schools. By randomizing desk buddy assignments based on popularity of students, the study aims to uncover optimal matching strategies to improve the outcomes and social integration of students with a special focus on the ones who are relatively isolated. The project is currently running in over 20 schools spread across 13 cities in India in 4 different states.
Research assistantship is required with respect to data cleaning and entry for analysis. Homogenizing academic records provided by schools, carrying systematic checks on the data available from surveys, collecting primary information about school characteristics from the internet, hand coding scanned documents and coding information using OCR are a couple of tasks that the research team needs assistance with. Additionally, you will be asked to generate summary statistics and carry out some preliminary statistical analysis from time to time. A good handle over Python / Stata will be preferred. Time permitting and based on skill level, the research team may seek assistance with some other projects currently being rolled out in Kenya, Abu Dhabi and India. All projects touch aspects of behavioral economics, education, social networks and culture.
Tatiana Mocanu (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Equity and Efficiency Consequences of Racial Quotas in Hiring
This paper studies the labor market consequences of a racial hiring quota in Brazil’s federal public sector. The student will work on big data tracking the universe of work records for all formal workers in the country, as well as performance in job hiring processes and long-term career outcomes.
Workload will primarily involve data work. Intermediate coding skill is required, with opportunity for further development and use of cutting-edge methods. Use of R or Python are preferred, but Stata is also acceptable. Knowledge of Portuguese, Spanish, or Italian are a bonus, but not necessary.
Dafne Murillo (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Land Redistribution and Productivity
This project studies a land reform in 1970s Latin America. The reform (i) expropriated large landholdings or “haciendas” and gave them to predominantly indigenous peasants and (ii) promoted the horizontal integration of smallholder farms into communal ownership. We investigate the effect of redistribution through reallocation of property rights on productivity. RAs will have the opportunity to develop skills in applied economic research and data analysis more broadly.
We have secured access to a wide variety of historical data sources. RA tasks will include project management, data cleaning, and cross-validating sources to build a novel dataset. Knowledge of Spanish is required. Knowledge of Stata and/or Python is useful but not required.
Jacob Spitz (PhD Student – POSITION CLOSED
Putting the Association in Association Football
When a group of people are working together the relationships between team members affect their output. But neoclassical economics hasn’t typically accounted for the value of relationships, and data challenges have limited contemporary economists’ ability to estimate it. This project uses data from association football (soccer) to quantify the importance of relationships between players. It sits within a literature on peer effects, which is a subtopic of both labour economics and organizational economics (Manski 1993 is the seminal paper).
You will help me with scraping and collecting the data from publicly available sources of football data. Data scraping will be a key skill: some existing tools for scraping football data exist in R, but there is also scope for the RA to develop their own scraping tools using R or another language of their choice. This is primarily a web scraping project, but there is also scope for you to explore the econometric modelling side and/or the data visualization side. Reach out and we can chat about what you’re most interested in!
Jerry Shi (PhD Student – POSITION CLOSED
Taxation and Forms of Shareholder Compensation by US public firms
In this project, we study whether differential tax treatments based on shareholder characteristics (such as tax-exemption status by university endowments and pension funds, foreign nationality, etc.) affect publicly traded firms’ intention to compensate shareholders in different forms, including share repurchase or dividend payouts.
The RA will be responsible for data collection and data analysis including drawing graphs and running regressions. Interest in the subject matter is a requirement, and coursework in public economics AND financial economics is a significant plus.
Roberto Zuniga (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Climate Variation, Food Price Volatility and the Role of Global Trade
This project will look at global crop production and prices, estimate how much of the volatility in these variables is explained by climate variation and study the role of trade in mitigating these impacts.
In the first stage of the project, the RA will assist us conducting an initial literature review. The RA will help us summarize and organize articles at the intersection of agriculture, trade, and climate economics. In the second stage of the project the RA will help with exploratory data analyses of trade, yield, and climate data. For this part, knowledge on conducting quantitative analyses in either R, Python or Stata will be necessary.
Hannah Farkas (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Political economy of disaster aid
In this project, I study the process through which natural disasters can be declared as federal emergencies. This declaration process allows for impacted communities to access a lot of much needed financial aid, but past studies show that there is significant political bias in the decision process. I have digitized a new dataset on a portion of this process and am working on gathering more data on the history of this process and merging this data with existing extreme weather data.
Interest in looking through archives and political documents, recording data in Excel, possibly working with data in R (but not required).
Eshaan Patel (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Power, Targeting, and Firm Growth
There are dramatic differences in institutions and power across countries. In a context with weak institutions, are powerful firms able to use the political sector to target their less powerful competitors? This project seeks to identify the implications of this channel using data from Latin America to see if it can explain aggregate data on firm size and growth. RAs will have the opportunity to develop skills in applied economic research and data analysis more broadly.
Data management. Cleaning firm scraped data. Extracting and cross-validating data from firm sanction reports (manually and/or with machine-learning tools). Work with Google API to geocode firms for spatial analysis (no prior knowledge required, training will be provided). Tasks require basic knowledge of Spanish. Programming experience is preferred. Python/GIS knowledge is useful but not required.
Kosha Modi (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Asset Prices around Inflation Announcements
We look at asset price movements around inflation announcements to understand market-perceived sources of inflation, whether it is supply driven, demand driven or policy driven.
STATA.
John Mutter (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Disasters and development/Climate change choices
I have two books moving toward completion and publication. “Disasters and Development” is co-authored with my co-instructor Sonali Deraniyagala, a political economist and is a short text to support a course of the same title. The other is “The unbearable choices climate change will bring”. I need assistance with both.
Some research into the statistics of disasters and climate change processes. Editorial. Reference checking, investigation into suitable tables and illustrations suitable for publication. General support for submission and revision process.
Hanyao Zhang (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Procedure choice in belief updating under subjective mental model
I am conducting a lab experiment to test a model of costly procedure choice in belief updating, and see to what extent it can explain the well-documented bias of correlation neglect. I also aim to see to what extent the procedure choice can reveal how people (potentially incorrectly) perceive correlated data and adjust their beliefs accordingly.
The tasks will mainly include 1) setting up and administering lab experiment sessions as my assistant; 2) analyzing data with python. The RA can get some hands-on experience in doing behavioral econ research in a lab, and experience in data analytics in python. Some understanding of python is required. Knowledge in html/css/javascript and Stata will also be valued.
Clara Berestycki (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Adaptation to Pollution Shocks / Climate Policy Uncertainty
We build an indicator of climate policy uncertainty using press data and use our indicator to analyze the effect of climate policy uncertainty on firm-level investments and on stock-market outcomes like stock market returns and volatility. The other project I need help with concerns the analysis of the impact of pollution spikes on mobility using geo-localized cell-phone data. In the framework of this project I need to collect the geolocation of several places of interest in Northern California (example: senior centers, hospitals, schools).
Tasks: – Download geo-localized coordinates of places of interest through Google Maps’ API – Download and clean market data like stock prices from WRDS through their API – Data cleaning and descriptive statistics Skills: – R or Python programming, python preferred. R and Stata a plus but not necessary.
Waseem Noor (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Principles of Econ Course Update
The Principles of Econ class is taught in the Fall and Spring semesters. This project continues cataloguing questions from problem sets, midterms and finals from the past 5 years. The RA will also help with suggestions for future questions.
Strong organizational skills, ability to work with SQL, Excel, PowerPoint and Word, and a broad interest in economic issues is a must. Students should have completed the core courses and declared an Economics major. Preference for students who have taken Principles with Prof Noor.
Dongcheng Yang (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Credit Guarantee and Financial Misallocation in Japan’s SMEs
This project examines the impact of Japan’s Credit Guarantee Scheme (CGS) on financial misallocation within Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). It explores how the government’s credit guarantees influence SMEs’ access to debt and equity, potentially leading to suboptimal financial resource distribution. Employing a robust empirical strategy, including a difference-in-difference analysis, the study aims to discern the effects of these guarantees on SME finance misallocation and assesses the broader economic implications of such policies.
The RA will primarily assist in data analysis and literature review. Key responsibilities include data collection, data cleaning, and statistical analysis. The ideal candidate should have strong skills in econometrics and proficiency in statistical software (e.g., Stata, Python). Japanese language proficiency is desirable for navigating local databases and literature.
Seyhan Erden (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Evaluating the Evaluations
This study examines the varied factors influencing student evaluations. Using economics courses at Columbia University from Fall 2018 to Spring 2023, the research explores diverse influences beyond traditional variables by analyzing 25,390 evaluations across 459 courses and 9 semesters.
Advanced knowledge of Stata is required. We will ask RA to produce publishable quality tables and graphs using Stata.
Kate Musen (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Child Health and Welfare Policy in the United States
I am looking for up to two RAs to assist with multiple projects in the domain of child health and welfare policy in the United States. Topics of study include foster care reform, changes to the Medicaid program, child mental health, and historical determinants of infant health. This project is ideal for students looking to learn more about applied microeconomics research and child welfare policy. Interest in these issues is more important than advanced technical skills.
Potential tasks include literature reviews, compiling the details of relevant policy changes, background research, and data entry. Knowledge of Excel is necessary. Knowledge of Stata and of Wayback Machine is a plus but not required. If the RA is proficient in Stata, I may also ask for assistance with code review. Attention to detail, organization, clear communication, and tenacious Googling are the most important skills for this project.
Victoria Mooers (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Social Networks and Electoral Competition
This project explores how disparities in voters’ exposure to information through social networks impacts voters’ political participation and, in turn, electoral competition (in the US). I examine how the level of alignment between social networks and congressional boundaries impacts (1) how familiar voters are with their congressional representatives, (2) voter turnout and representatives’ incumbency advantage, and (3) political donations and volunteering.
This project is ideal for students interested in political economy, networks, and/or social media. The RA’s primary task will be to assist with collecting, assembling, and analyzing data on surveys of voters, representative characteristics, campaign contributions, and political advertising. Experience with Stata and/or Python is required. I’m looking for a student that can commit 5-7 hours/week.
Natalie Yang (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
No Way to the Highway: The Political Economy of Highway Revolts
This project studies the widespread protests against urban highway construction that occurred during the 1960s-70s. The benefits and costs of highways in cities accrued to different groups, often along racial and socioeconomic lines. We plan to study the role of information in propagating protests by looking at historical newspapers and community organizations.
The main initial task for the RA will be to help myself and my coauthor look through historical newspaper databases to see what information is available and what data we can collect. Once we can collect the data, there will be opportunities for the RA to assist with exploratory analysis. Experience with GIS as well as some statistical programming language (e.g., Stata, R, Python) will be useful but not required.
Anna Papp (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Climate Adaptation and the Gig Economy
I study the use of gig economy platforms (e.g., UberEats) as a form of climate and environmental adaptation and consequent effects on labor markets. First, I investigate whether consumers order more food delivery in response to risks such as extreme temperatures, rainfall, and pollution. Then, I study the consequences of these adaptations on the labor supply of gig economy workers.
The main task of the RA will consist of background research on the food delivery industry and related policies (e.g., labor laws for gig workers) in Europe (UK/Germany). The RA may also help with literature reviews on platforms. Additionally, based on interest and skills, the RA could help with data processing, cleaning, and analysis in R (related to labor force surveys); so familiarity with R is a plus. Some German knowledge is also a plus, but definitely not required.
Martin Uribe (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Global Capital Control Datasets
Professor Uribe is currently seeking research assistants (RAs) who will collaborate with a team comprising researchers from Columbia and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The primary responsibility involves gathering information on global capital-control measures, utilizing various sources and techniques.
Tasks: contribute to data gathering for new capital controls dataset Skills: the search is particularly targeting, but not exclusively limited to, students possessing skills in Economics and computer sciences.
