Research Opportunities Spring 2021
The following faculty members and PhD students are 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).
PLEASE NOTE: All RA Positions for Spring 2021 are now CLOSED.
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The following positions are now CLOSED. Please do NOT contact the researchers about these positions.
Dario Romero (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Something Biased This Way Comes
We are investigating the effect of media on political ideology in parties. The project is at the intersection of economics and political science. There is a traditional debate on whether media firms supply slant in their content or if they simply respond to consumer demand for content. We already have a number of results and want to move on to the next exciting stage of the project.
Ability to research and collect data of US elections starting from the primaries stage. No programming language skills required. Interest in the topic is a must
Simon Lee (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Econometrics
The research assistant will work on building and testing packages for recently developed econometric methods using R, Stata, or Python.
Experience in programming (R, Stata, or Python) and econometrics at the level of W3412
Ye Zhang (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Entrepreneurial Finance and Venture Capital Industry
These projects examine the global entrepreneurial finance process using recent experimental methods. We will analyze the collected data and wrap up with a preliminary draft.
Preferred skills: 1) good English writing skills 2) data collection 3) coding (either R, STATA or python)
Szymon Sacher (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
(with Andrew Olenski)
Cream-Skimming in Long Term Care Market
We study the impact of the rise of forms care alternative to Skilled Nursing Facilities (nursing homes) of long-term care on welfare (including health outcomes and costs of care). Interestingly, there is a substantial cross-state variation in whether states’ Medicaid programs pay for stays at Assisted Living Facilities which are much cheaper but offer much lower level of care to patients. We ask whether this offers good value for money.
We need help compiling datasets from a variety of publicly available sources. This includes collecting information on which services are covered by states’ Medicaid, helping compiling a panel of Assisted Living Facilities, doing primary analysis of trends that can be seen in publicly available data on facility/provider level. An ideal RA would have some knowledge of Stata (or R) and have some knowledge of (or interest in) Medicare/Medicaid and health economics more general.
Silvio Ravaioli (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
How people decide what they want to know
Collecting information is an important stage of many decisions (voting, buying healthy food, accepting a job offer). The existing literature suggests that we suffer from biases that make us collect insufficient information, or collect mostly information that is consistent with what we already know. I am working on two projects that explore how we can help people correct these biases and make better decisions.
Applicants with programming skills (preferably Python) and an interest in behavioral economics will receive priority. The RA will help to analyze experimental data about information collection and choice.
David Weinstein (Professor) – POSITION CLOSED
Foreign Technology and Japanese Industrialization
The project is examining the sources of Japanese industrialization in the 19th and early 20th century. We are trying to understand how access to foreign technology and the exploitation of coal and other natural resources helped enable Japan to transition to modern economic growth and break out of the Malthusian trap. The project will help us to better understand the causes for the industrial revolution, by examining how technological advances in the west were transmitted to Japan.
The RA will help build a dataset in which we match Japanese industries with keywords describing the technology used in these industries. In addition, the RA will be expected to help clean a dataset on 19th century Japanese prices, outputs, inputs, and industry energy intensities. Once the dataset has been cleaned, the RA will help format it for econometric analysis. The RA will not be involved in much data entry as this has already been done. Knowledge of Japanese is helpful but not necessary.
Shogo Sakabe (PhD Student) – POSITION CLOSED
Place-Based Policies and the Spatial Distribution of Corporate Investment
I am looking for a detail-oriented RA to work on an exciting new project co-authored with Cameron LaPoint, Assistant Professor of Finance at Yale School of Management. We are interested in how place-based policies, which offer firms tax-based incentives to relocate to economically struggling regions, can impact the landscape of corporate investment and the macroeconomy. This is a timely topic related to tax competition among states and municipalities for the location of Amazon’s HQ2, and the recently announced departures of firms like Oracle and Elon Musk’s Space X from California for Texas.
The bulk of the day-to-day work involves creating variables from a database containing financial statements for listed companies and their creditors in Japan since the 1980s, which is our setting for this project. We will be merging this information into confidential Census data covering the universe of firms and establishments in Japan over a forty-year period. Familiarity with Excel is necessary to work on this project. Some working knowledge of a statistical package such as Stata or R would also be useful. Japanese language skills would also be a big plus but are not required.
