Summer Research Program

Project Title: Economic Opportunity Influences Preferences and Behavior
Professor:  Sheryl Ball (E-mail)
Brief description:


Economic researchers often find differences in the preferences and behavior of men and women. What is puzzling is that these differences are inconsistent. For example, a study on competitiveness found that men are more competitive than women in patriarchal societies, whereas women are equally competitive in matrilineal societies (Anderson et al RESTAT, 2013). This result motivates the present study which will investigate whether these differences in economic preferences and behavior are linked to differences in men’s’ and women’s’ economic opportunities. Each country’s economic opportunity is measured by the World Bank, which recently found that women have three quarters of the legal rights afforded to men. Our working hypothesis is that gender differences in preferences and behavior will be more similar where the level of economic opportunity is more similar.

This summer’s project is to find journal articles that document gender results in laboratory experiments and to create a dataset using their publicly available data. Undergraduate student researcher will work remotely under the supervision of a PhD student in Economics. There may be additional opportunities for undergraduate researchers who have advanced technical skills to help with econometric analysis of the data, create figures and tables, etc. during Fall 23.
Duration of project: June - July

Work Location: Remote work allowed
Required skill set:
Good accuracy and attention to detail, ability to work with remote supervision.

Project Title: 
Effects of Deportations and Repatriation on Hispanic American Identity, Assimilation, and Military Service
Professor:  Sergio Barrera (E-mail)
Brief description:


The purpose of this project is to study the effects of contemporary and historical immigration policies whose intention was to remove a large fraction of Hispanic residents outside of the US. Contemporary policies include Secure Communities and 287g which operate through partnerships with local law enforcement. Historical practices include the large scale repatriation of Mexican origin residents of the United States during the Great Depression. Impacts studied will not only include economic impacts, but also measures related to identity, such as Spanish language use, racial/ethnic identification, as well as military service.

The researcher will help with the preliminary stages of this project by searching and summarizing the relevant literature related to the impacts of immigration and determinants of assimilation. They will also assist with collecting data from library and online resources including historical newspaper reports and government records. They will assist in creating the data set to be used in the analysis, and may also help with any preliminary statistical analysis to be performed on the project. The researcher will also get the opportunity to learn more advanced econometric techniques designed to estimate causal effects.
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location: Must be in Blacksburg
Required Skill Set:

Ability to navigate library resources and online archives to find information on immigration laws and repatriation practices.
Knowledge of excel and statistical analysis software like STATA or R, in order to build a dataset identifying which neighborhoods or counties were effected by immigration and repatriation efforts.
Ability to summarize scholarship concerning immigration and repatriation practices in order to gain an understanding of potential impacts of these practices on Hispanic Americans.
Basic knowledge of econometric techniques like regression analysis used to analyze data.

Project Title: Labor Market Impact of Generative AI and Large Language Models
Professor:  Suqin Ge (E-mail)
Brief description:


Generative AI such as Chat GPT and other large language models are poised to change the future of work and the labor market. In this project, we want to study the most recent literature on the potential labor market impact of AI and explore new data to investigate the potential economic, social, and policy implications of AI and related technologies.
Duration of project: July
Work Location: Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set:

Synthesizing
Writing
Communication

Project Title:  Testing for neglected nonlinearity in high-dimensional Series
Professor: Ali Habibnia (E-mail)
Brief description:

Numerous real-world phenomena and series exhibit nonlinearity, yet conventional time series analysis often assumes linearity. In this project, we present a comprehensive review of past and recent statistical advancements for testing the hypothesis of time series linearity in multivariate settings. Additionally, we assess the efficacy of major nonlinearity tests using simulated series, highlighting their strengths and limitations, and identifying opportunities for further research.
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location:  Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set:
Knowledge of time series econometrics
Python programming

Project Title: The Impact of Online Social Networks on Economic Behaviors
Professor: Xu Lin (E-mail)
Brief description:
The unprecedented ongoing innovation in Social networking technologies, such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and so on, has made sharing daily activity through various online social medias almost costless and instantly. Understanding how online social networks work will be of great importance in improving marketing effectiveness, promoting desirable behaviors among large population, and so on. However, the identification of social interaction effects is very difficult. The estimates of social interaction effects could be contaminated by omitted variable bias, endogenous network formation, among others. To identify the causal effects of online social networks on economic behaviors, we plan to employ a simultaneous structural equation system to jointly model both endogenous network formation and social influences. In this 2-month summer project, we would like to hire a research assistant to collect the relevant social media data, at both individual and regional levels.
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location: Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set:
Excel
Stata (Preferred)

Project Title: Mental Health Consequences of COVID-19
Professor: Xu Lin (E-mail)
Brief description:
As one of the biggest global crises, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated profound and long-lasting health, social and economic impacts. The spread of the disease, and the initiation of preventative measures such as social distancing, self-isolation and lockdowns, increase the risk of depression, anxiety as well as other psychiatric disorders. Furthermore, the health consequences of COVID-19 are mediated by factors like age, gender, race, among others, and therefore are unevenly distributed across different subgroup of the population. Although the general medical complications caused by COVID-19 have been intensively studied, few studies address the potential impact on mental health. This project plans to evaluate the health impact of COVID 19 with a particular focus on mental health. In this 2-month summer project, we would like to hire a research assistant to collect all the relevant individual and regional data, at both the county and MSA levels.
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location: Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set:
Excel
Stata (Preferred)

Project Title:  The Economics of Prices in Pre-Modern China
Professor: Shaowen Luo (E-mail) - with Byron Tsang
Brief description:

Our project aims to collect, reconcile, and study price data from pre-modern China, found in government documents, official historical books, notebooks, and other historical records. Prices serve as important economic indicators and allow us to measure living standards by deflating incomes or wages into real amounts or their purchasing power. The quality of cross-sectional price data also reflects the virtuosity of local government employees. Analyzing these micro-price data can help us identify cross-sectional and cross-time cultural and economic measures. By combining regression analyses with modern Chinese data, we can investigate cultural persistence and economic growth. For example, we can explore the relationship between geography and price dispersion, as well as the impact of different monetary systems on prices. We can also investigate whether places with low data quality in the past still have poor data quality today. We are currently seeking assistance with raw data cleaning and basic linear regression analysis during the upcoming summer. Proficiency in Stata is required. Knowledge of the Chinese language and Matlab is preferred but not required.
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location: Remote work allowed
Required skill set: 
Proficiency in Stata
Matlab (Preferred)
Knowledge of Chinese language (Preferred)

Project Title: The Southern Homestead Act and Freedemen's Bank in Florida
Professor:  Melinda Miller (E-mail)
Brief description:

The Southern Homestead Act (SHA) of 1866 provided a route to land ownership for former slaves and is largely regarded as a failure. The Freedmen’s Bank provided banking services to former slaves before its collapse in 1874. But how did these policies effect people who used them? In the project, I am following families across time to understand the long run impact of homesteading and bank failures on families. I need assistance in locating people in census data in order to construct a dataset.
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location: Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set:
Excel

Project Title: The Effect of the 1907 Expatriation Act on Marriage Patterns
Professor: Melinda Miller (E-mail)
Brief description:

Under the Expatriation Act of 1907, women who were American citizens would lose their citizenship if they married non-citizen men. American men did not face expatriation. Instead, if they married non-citizens, their wives would gain U.S. citizenship. This law introduced a large cost to American women who married immigrants. I am studying how the law impacted women’s marriage decisions and how the assimilation of immigrant men. I am looking for assistance in assembling a dataset to use for analysis. Tasks will include researching state laws about women’s suffrage and property ownership, collecting data on enemy alien registration during World War I, and helping to prepare data from marriage records.
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location: Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set:

Excel, State or R

Project Title: Inequality of opportunity in education in the Middle East
Professor: Djavad Salehi-Isfahani (E-mail)
Brief description:

In the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), as in most developing countries, education is the main path to social and economic mobility. Equitable development thus depends on equality of access to educational opportunities across social and income classes. This project studies to the extent of the equality of opportunity in education in selected MENA countries. The project employs data from the international Trends in Mathematics and Science Study that reports on student learning in these subjects and includes information on the child parental and community characteristics. The study will update a previous one that estimated the share of these characteristics in total inequality in TIMSS scores top to 2007. Since then data has been provided for three new rounds of TIMSS (2011, 2015, and 2019).
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location: Must be in Blacksburg
Required skill set:
Familiarity with Statistics
Stata software

Project Title: The evolution of inequality in Iran before and after the Islamic Revolution
Professor:  Djavad Salehi-Isfahani (E-mail)
Brief description :

Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution followed a decade of rapid western-oriented development that increased social and economic inequality. The project examines the trend in inequality in the last half a century in several important respects: gender, rural-urban residence, education, and income. Whereas the Revolution promised, and to some extent delivered, more egalitarian policies, especially with respect to investment in rural and urban areas, at the same time it institutionalized inequality between men and women. The project will examine the challenges that post-revolutionary Iran has faced in moving toward a more inclusive society in view of this contradiction. The summer project aims to develop a narrative for for a book proposal. The summer research will identify and summarize the literature for larger study, as well as develop the basic facts regarding various aspect of inequality in Iran.
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location: Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set:
Writing skills
Data skills

Project Title: Are High Profile Literary Awards Different from other Awards
Professor: Sudipta Sarangi (E-mail)
Brief description:
Literary awards can be seen as requiring different type of creative skills than scientific awards which require a substantial amount of knowledge about the discipline to make significant advances - at least advances that will be worthy of winning awards. This project will aim to establish the similarities and differences by comparing literary awards like the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Mann-Booker Prize and the Pulitzer with the Nobel Prize in scientific disciplines.
Duration of project: June – July
Work Location: Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set:
Basic Data Handling Skills
Good Writing Skills

Project Title: The Tweeting Economists
Professor: Byron Tsang (E-mail)
Brief description:

The overall goal of the project is to study economists' behaviors on Twitter. We have collected a huge dataset of about 2 million tweets from over 1000 economists, and we need a skilled programmer to scrap data (publications, citations, etc) from sources like RePEc and Google Scholar. We also need help doing some simple data analysis.
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location: Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set: 
Experience with STATA and PYTHON (esp. using it for web scraping)

Project Title: The Impact of Covid and Travel on Home Court Advantage
Professor: Jadrian Wooten (E-mail)
Brief description:

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many aspects of daily life, including sports. In the early stages of the pandemic, many sports leagues restricted fan attendance and team travel. This provides a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of fans and travel on home advantage, a phenomenon where teams tend to perform better when playing in their home arena. The research project aims to analyze the impact of COVID-19 related restrictions on home advantage in college basketball. The study will compare the performance of teams during the 2020-2021 season with more recent seasons, taking into account the differences in fan attendance and team travel. The findings of this research project will contribute to our understanding of the importance of home advantage in college basketball and how COVID-19 related restrictions affected the sport. This information can be used by sports organizations to develop strategies for improving the overall fan experience while maintaining the health and safety of players and fans during pandemics or other crises.
Duration of project: June - July
Work Location: Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set:

Comfortable with sports statistics, particularly basketball
Basic statistical skills
Ability to obtain and summarize quantitative research Familiarity with spreadsheet software

Project Title:  Accessibility Issues in Economics Education
Professor: Jadrian Wooten (E-mail)
Brief description:

In recent years, the adoption of digital resources and third-party tools has become increasingly common in economics pedagogy research. However, these resources may be susceptible to link rot, a phenomenon in which hyperlinked materials become inaccessible to readers over time, and reference rot, where reference material exists but is no longer the same as the original citation. This study aims to investigate the prevalence of link rot and reference rot in journals that focus on improving economics pedagogy. By analyzing a sample of articles published in these journals, we assess the extent of the problem and offer recommendations to mitigate its impact on future research. Our findings suggest that the issue of link rot and reference rot in economics pedagogy is significant and highlights the need for scholars to take proactive steps to address it.
Duration of project: June – July
Work Location: Remote Work Allowed
Required skill set:
Comfortable reading academic articles
Familiarity with Google Docs & Sheets
Strong organizational skills
Keen attention to detail