updated Jan 22, 2018
Research Opportunities Spring 2018
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 (which is 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 faculty member directly at the email address provided. If you are selected by the faculty member then contact me at se5@columbia.edu.
When contacting faculty regarding a position you should include a copy of your Columbia transcript (unofficial is ok) and a CV/resume. Additional opportunities may be announced next week.
Vinayak Iyer (PhD Student) is looking for an RA for a project examining how the performance of Members of Parliament in Canada respond to victory margins. Of particular focus, is their behavior just prior to elections. The work would mostly involve web scraping. If interested in this position please contact directly at vi2137@columbia.edu.
Yue Yu (PhD Student) is looking for an RA to assist with two empirical projects related to researchers’ co-authorship patterns and productivity. Tasks for this position include: 1) update Stata codes to accommodate new data; 2) analysis of data. The RA position is well-suited to a student who has interests in empirical economic analysis. The RA needs to have taken econometrics and be familiar with Stata. If interested in this position please contact directly at yy2558@columbia.edu.
David Weinstein (Professor) is looking for a research assistant, who can help build a dataset on Japanese 19th century trade and early 20th century development. The work will involve scanning archival materials and looking for new data sources. Knowledge of Japanese is helpful, but not required. In addition, he would like the research assistant to help develop teaching materials for a course on the Economic Development of Japan. Applicants should have skills with Excel and STATA. If interested contact him at dew35@columbia.edu .
Irasema Alonso (Lecturer) is looking for an RA to help with her financial economics course: downloading and using data and helping to construct homework exercises. The RA needs to have taken statistics and a course in finance (financial economics or corporate finance).If interested in this position please contact her directly at ia2283@columbia.edu.
Simon Lee (Professor) is looking for an RA to help with a research project that applies new econometric methods to economic data. The RA must have some experience in programming (STATA, R, or MATLAB) and econometrics at the level of W3412.If interested in this position please contact him directly at sl3841@columbia.edu.
Reka Juhasz (Professor) is looking for an RA to work on a project that examines the interaction between trade and growth in cities over time. The RA’s primary task will be help set up a dataset on ports for the period 1950-1990 with the potential opportunity to take part in data analysis at a later stage. If interested in this position please contact her directly at rj2446@columbia.edu.
Ashna Arora (PhD student) is looking for an RA to help collect data on prosecutor elections in the US. This data is available online but is scattered across state election websites in varying form.
If interested in this position please contact her directly at aa3332@columbia.edu.
Alessandra Casella (Professor) is looking for assistance is an experimental project on mediation. Theoretical considerations suggest that the mere presence of mediator can facilitate the resolution of conflict and this even if the mediator has no enforcement power and no ex ante superior information. The fundamental reason is the possible confidentiality of the communication, which allows the parties to be more truthful and thus the mediator to make better informed recommendations. (See Horner et al, “Mediation and peace”, Review of Economic Studies, 2015). But is this insight confirmed in an experimental setting? The project, jointly run by Alessandra Casella and Massimo Morelli, involves a series of experiments that will be run at Celss, Columbia experimental lab. They are looking for help with: (a) the practicalities of setting up and running experiments; (2) the analysis of the data; (3) the extension of the theory to the environments reproduced in the experiment. The project is well-suited to a student with interests in experimental economics, a good grasp of game theory, and familiarity with programming (R and/or Matlab)If interested in this position please contact her directly at ac186@columbia.edu.
Evan Friedman (PhD Student) is looking for an RA for a series of related projects on behavioral game theory. The work would mostly involve coding up parametric models in Matlab and fitting them to experimental data. The RA would need some prior knowledge of Matlab (say writing functions). Having taken a course in game theory would be a plus but is not required. If interested in this position please contact him directly at ekf2119@columbia.edu.
Bhaven Sampat (Professor, Public Health) is looking for an RA for a project using patent-science citations to assess links between public and private sector innovation. This is a joint project with two other economists Kevin Bryan (Toronto) and Yasin Ozcan (NBER/MIT).
The tasks would involve (a) helping administer a survey of patent inventors, (b) helping write a grant application based on preliminary results, and depending on timing perhaps also helping with literature review, bibliography, and general assembly of a paper which we’ll submit for consideration by NBER Summer Institute in April. There would definitely be some “grunt” work, including looking up emails for inventors, hand coding information from patents to train a machine learning model, etc., but also some more interesting opportunities to learn new skills and about a new topic in the economics of innovation. It would be ideal for someone with excellent English and writing skills, an interest in learning how to do survey research, and/or an interest in the economics of science/innovation. Stata and/or Python great but not essential. If interested in this position please contact him directly at bns3@columbia.edu.
