Summer Research Program 2025

Project Title:
Examining the relationship between policy and gender differences in decision-making
Professor:  Sheryl Ball (E-mail)
Brief description:



Hypothesis:  When policies treat men and women differently, their individual micro level decisions are different.
 
Motivating Example:  A lot of research finds that women are more risk-averse than men.  Is this difference more pronounced in societies where women are not allowed to drive, become educated, hold positions of power in business and government?
 
To test the hypothesis, we plan a meta-analysis of data from about 1200 published papers that measure experimentally preferences and decisions such as risk-aversion, altruism, inequality aversion and trust.  Students in the Summer Research Program will help to compile a data set and perform preliminary data analysis..


Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set:
Reliability, strong teamwork skills, accurate, enter data in spreadsheets.  Data analysis skills also helpful.

Project Title: 
Determinants and Barriers of Veterans Mental Health Outcomes
Professor:  Sergio Barrera (E-mail)
Brief description:



This project will examine what characteristics including personal, service related, local environment, and local mental health facility characteristics explain veteran's mental health outcomes. The project will focus on analyzing publicly available data using econometric and statistical techniques as well as summarizing literature investigating veterans labor market and mental health outcomes.
Work Location: May work Remotely
Required Skill Set:
Ability to search university databases and google scholar for relevant academic research, as well as experience using statistical software like STATA, or R.

Project Title: Determinants of Immigration Enforcement Partnerships with Local Law Enforcement
Professor:  Sergio Barrera (E-mail)
Brief description:



This project will examine what are determinants of local level immigration enforcement partnerships between Immigration and Custom's Enforcement and local law enforcement agencies. Emphasis will be placed on local population demographics, economic environment, and past participation in similar programs. Students will assist with statistical analysis and literature review of academic papers on similar topics.
Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set:

Ability to search university databases and google scholar for relevant academic research, as well as experience using statistical software like STATA, or R.

Project Title:  Alternative measures of assimilation: political preference, military service, and intermarriage
Professor: Sergio Barrera (E-mail)
Brief description:


This project will examine determinants of little studied measures of cultural assimilation: political preference, military service and intermarriage. It will focus mostly on immigrants and their descendants but may also focus on racial and ethnic minorities. The project will examine factors related to immigration policy, economic mobility, as well as social movements in a historical context 1910s-1950s and more contemporary context (1980s-present).
Work Location:  May work Remotely
Required skill set:

Ability to search university databases and google scholar for relevant academic research, as well as experience using statistical software like STATA, or R.

Project Title: The Impact of Visa Restrictions on the Stay Rate of International STEM PhDs
Professor: Brianna Felegi (E-mail)
Brief description:

Foreign-born PhDs play a crucial role in shaping the landscape of the U.S. skilled workforce; therefore, whether individuals remain in the U.S. after receiving their PhD has important ramifications for the U.S. economy. This project seeks to understand whether individuals that witness sudden visa restrictions during their schooling - even if they are themselves unaffected - plays a role in the decision to remain in the United States after they have completed their Ph.D. The research assistant will create catalog of all visa restrictions that occurred over the last 25 years as well as complete some data analysis using the Survey of Doctoral Recipients.
Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set: Familiarity with Stata or equivalent program

Project Title: Private Choice Programs, Teachers, and the Decision to Enroll in Charter Schools
Professor: Brianna Felegi (E-mail)
Brief description:

Private choice programs (private school voucher programs, educational savings accounts, etc. ) are becoming an increasingly popular policy to address inequities in access to schooling options. While much research exists about the impacts of these programs on students that participate in the program and students remaining in the public school system, little is known about whether the adoption of such policies changes where teachers decide to work or how private choice programs interact with other school choice policies like charter schools. The goal of this project will be to dive into the literature to understand what we know about these questions and gather information on charter school enrollment across the country.  
Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set:

Familiarity with Stata or equivalent program preferred

Project Title:  Permutation Driven Independence Tests for High Dimensional Economic Data
Professor: Ali Habibnia (E-mail)
Brief description:


This project will develop and validate permutation-based statistical dependence tests such as distance correlation and kernel Hilbert–Schmidt Independence Criterion tailored to the challenges of modern macro financial data: serial correlation, structural breaks, and hundreds of candidate predictors. The undergraduate assistant will help design block permutation algorithms that preserve time-series dynamics, implement them in Python/R, and conduct Monte Carlo experiments alongside empirical applications to Federal Reserve (FRED-MD) and CRSP data. Expected outputs include an open source code package with reproducible Jupyter notebooks and a working paper draft for submission to a field journal.
Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set: 
The position is ideal for students with strong quantitative skills who wish to deepen their expertise in econometrics, statistical computing, and empirical research.

Skillsets we need students to have:
- Intermediate programming experience, ideally in Python (and/or R)
- Strong academic writing skills, including communicating technical content clearly
- Effective time management, especially being on top of project deadlines
- Team collaboration skills, including openness to feedback, timely responsiveness, and coordination with others on shared tasks

Project Title: Covariance Estimation for Integrating 24/7 Crypto Signals with Five-Day Equity Markets
Professor:  Ali Habibnia (E-mail)
Brief description: 
This project will refine and empirically validate a calendar adjusted Hayashi–Yoshida (HY) estimator that measures the covariance and correlation between continuously traded cryptocurrency returns and five-day equity returns without discarding weekend observations. The undergraduate assistant will (i) engineer synchronized return intervals that allow the HY algorithm to recognize Friday–Monday overlap, (ii) code a modular Python implementation for cross asset panels, (iii) conduct Monte Carlo experiments to quantify bias and efficiency relative to weekday only and carry forward benchmarks, and (iv) apply the method to Bitcoin, Ether, and S&P 500 futures to assess the incremental risk forecasting value of weekend crypto movements.
Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set:
The role is ideal for quantitatively driven undergraduates eager to deepen their expertise in time-series econometrics, financial data engineering, and open-source scientific computing.

Skillsets we need students to have:
- Intermediate programming experience, ideally in Python (and/or R)
- Strong academic writing skills, including communicating technical content clearly
- Effective time management, especially being on top of project deadlines
- Team collaboration skills, including openness to feedback, timely responsiveness, and coordination with others on shared tasks

Project Title: Price Match Policies
Professor: Mark Liu (E-mail)
Brief description:

Many stores have some sort of price match policies - that they will match the price of their competitors on any product they sell.  Does this improve the shoppers' confidence?  We want to investigate such practices with this summer's project.

Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set: 
Detail oriented, independent, and self motivated.

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


As part of growing anti-immigrant sentiment during the early twentieth century, the United States enacted a series of laws designed to restrict immigration.  Although the literacy test (passed in 1917) and Quota Acts (1921 and 1924) are often highlighted as the beginning of these efforts, an earlier law sought to restrict the integration of immigrants into American society.  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.  They would forfeit the rights of U.S. citizenship and, depending on the laws of their spouse’s home country, could become stateless.  The Act was partially repealed by the Cable Act of 1922, although citizenship was not automatically reinstated for those who had been expatriated. 

Previous empirical work on the impact of the Expatriation Act has been limited.  Because marriage is an important channel by which immigrants can gain citizenship today, understanding how such laws impact behavior can provide insight into present-day immigration policy.  This paper investigates the Act’s origins and its effect on marriage and family formation.   
Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set:



Excel, R, or Stata

Project Title: A New Institutional History of Allotment:  Evidence from the Pine Ridge Reservation, 1904-1937
Professor: Melinda Miller (E-mail)
Brief description:

Allotment of American Indian reservations has been extensively written about and studied—often with a focus on the long-term effects.  However, there is a fair degree of uncertainty about process by which land was allotted, how and when individuals received titles in fee, and how land was transferred from Native ownership.  The goal of this project is to improve the understanding of the dynamics of allotment and its impact on individuals as the process was occurring by focusing on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is located in South Dakota.  To do this, we are digitizing and geocoding land, banking, and reservation-level census records for 8000 individuals on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1904 to 1934.  
Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set:
Familiarity with Statistics
Stata software

Project Title: Middle East Income and Gender Inequality in Historical Perspective 
Professor:  Djavad Salehi-Isfahani (E-mail)
Brief description :

Empirical and summarizing research on history of inequality in the Middle East.  I am especially interested in income and gender inequality.  Library/source research will compare land inequality in the early 20th century between Iran and one or two other Eastern countries, like Egypt and Turkey.  Statistical research will work with data to estimate well-known inequality indices.  Instructions provided. 
Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set:
Statistical skills, Stata or R.  Fluency in English and writing proficiency.

Project Title: Understanding Prestigious Awards
Professor: Sudipta Sarangi (E-mail)
Brief description:

The research involves collecting easily and publicly available data about prestigious awards like the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, etc and doing simple analysis.

Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set: 
Ability to collect data - scrapping ability would be great - not required.  Basic statistical analysis.

Project Title: Analyzing the Interaction Between AI and Game Theory
Professor: Sudipta Sarangi (E-mail)
Brief description:

Basically how AI plays simple games.  How does it compare to human behavior? Does AI have biases similar to human beings? 

Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set: 
Ability to work with AI and deal with the data generated by AI.  Simple statistical tests.

Project Title: Rawls's Responses to Nozick: A Reconstruction
Professor: Byron Tsang (E-mail)
Brief description:

This is a history of ideas project. After Rawls published his Theory of Justice in 1971, Nozick published his Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974, and in it there is a long section criticizing Rawls's theory. Rawls published a revised version of the Theory of Justice years later. While most of the revisions are stylistic, the more substantial revisions overlap quite a lot with Nozick's criticisms. The goal of the project is to reconstruct the "dialogue" between the two authors.   

Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set: 
The student should have read sections of both books, and are willing to read both of them carefully. I need someone to closely examine challenging texts with me, mostly over emails.

Project Title: How Economic Education Influences Congressional Votes on Trade and Economic Policy
Professor: Jadrian Wooten (E-mail)
Brief description:

This project examines whether members of Congress with backgrounds in economics vote differently on key economic legislation. While ideology and constituency preferences shape legislative behavior, the impact of formal economic training remains unclear. Using data from recent congressional sessions, we will analyze voting behavior on trade and economic policy, testing whether legislators with economics degrees are more likely to support market-oriented policies. We hope to provide insight into the role of economic education in shaping congressional decision-making.
Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set:

Comfortable reading academic articles
Familiarity with Google Docs & Sheets
Strong organizational skills
Keen attention to detail

Project Title:  The Impact of FCS to FBS Transitions on University Applications and Student Quality
Professor: Jadrian Wooten (E-mail)
Brief description:

This project investigates the academic impact of universities transitioning from the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) to the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). While transitioning to FBS typically results in higher costs due to more competitive athletic programs, proponents argue that it also enhances the prestige of the university, attracting higher-quality students and increasing donor support. we will analyze a sample of universities that have made this transition and compare them to universities that remained in FCS using a synthetic control method. By examining data on student applications, academic performance, and athletics outcomes, we assess whether there is a measurable improvement in student quality post-transition.

Work Location: May work Remotely
Required skill set:

R programming
Comfortable reading academic articles
Strong organizational skills