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Summer 2021 Internships

Ready to put your Economics education to work?

internship

The Department of Economics is pleased to offer internship opportunities again this Summer.
Students who receive this internship will receive a payment of $500
and a Certificate at the end of their project completion.

Eligibility: Economics majors Graduating in Spring or Summer 2021, rising Seniors and rising Juniors.
Depending on the number of applications, priority will be determined by class level.
Due to immigration laws, some international students may not be eligible to receive pay but are still encouraged to participate on a voluntary basis.

Application instructions: Review the project options listed. Using the link below, complete the application which will require you to upload a one-page resume and your unofficial transcript. You will be able to apply for up to 3 projects. 
All applications must be completed by 5pm on Wednesday, April 28.

Click HERE to Apply

Project Opportunities :

Project Title:  Trust and Betrayal in Vaccines during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Professor:  Sheryl Ball (E-mail)
Brief description:

Researchers use the term “vaccine hesitant” to describe people who delay or refuse vaccinations that protect against infectious diseases.  Betrayal aversion is a decision making preference that seems related to the “confidence” element of currently used measures of vaccine hesitancy.  It occurs when people avoid situations involving trust in order to avoid betrayal. When choosing between safety products like vaccines, betrayal averse individuals may accept lower levels of protection from the primary risk in order to avoid a secondary risk of being harmed by the safety product itself.  In this project we will conduct online experiments to investigate the sources of betrayal aversion to vaccines.  We will also test several persuasive messages to see which is most effective in increasing planned vaccine uptake.  Results of this study may be used to inform the Virginia Tech strategy on encouraging students to get COVID-19 vaccines during or prior to Fall semester 2021.
Duration of internship:  May - August 2021
Required skill set:
Familiarity with creating Qualtrics surveys
Stata or similar statistical software to create figures and conduct statistical tests

Project Title:  Current Practices in  Classroom Training for Ph.D. Economics Students
Professor:  Melanie Fox (E-mail)
Brief description:

Allgood, Hoyt, and McGoldrick present data on prevalence and opinions on current training given to graduate students and new faculty preparing them for classroom teaching. This study adds to their findings by surveying current practices on formal and information training for the classroom in Ph.D. economics programs.
Duration of internship: 1 month
Required Skill Set:
Basic statistical skills
Highly organized
High emotional intelligence
Ability to obtain and summarize qualitative research in economics
 
Project Title: The Impact of COVID-19 Lockdown on Gender Productivity
Professor:  Suqin Ge (E-mail)
Brief description:

Closures of schools and childcare facilities during the current Covid-19 pandemic have caused an enormous increase in demand for child care at home. The increased child care needs are expected to have a particularly large impact on working mothers’ labor productivity as they juggle between career and family responsibilities. In this project, we want to quantitatively assess the differential impact of Covid-19 lockdown on gender-specific labor productivity using a unique dataset constructed by the research team.
Duration of internship:
 2 months
Required skill set:

Data collection
Attendtion to detail
Time Management
Technical skills (familiar with spreadsheet software is requires, and familiar with statistical software is preferred)

Project Title:  How Cryptocurrencies Contribute to Financial Instability and Threaten National Security:  A Deep Learning-Based Estimation of Systemic Risk Spillover from Cryptocurrencies to the U.S. Financials Sector
Professor: Ali Habibnia (E-mail)
Brief description:

The advance of cryptocurrencies has sparked broad concern over their interplay with the existing global financial market. This project analyzes the risk spillover relation between cryptocurrencies and major financial assets and unravels how cryptocurrencies could influence the US financial systemic risk. Financial instability can lead to economic crises of such magnitude that they threaten national security. Having an accurate measure of systemic risk, which can be seen as any major failure of a financial system, gives central banks and policymakers the ability to take proper actions in order to stabilise financial markets. It’s imperative, and the subject of much ongoing work, to model and identify the level of systemic risk present in financial markets. The problem is challenging due to both the volume and density of financial data, and its connected nature between financial agents. Herein, we aim to develop a deep learning model to estimate the high-dimensional, nonlinear financial series. Extending previous works, our model leverages network analysis using nonparametric estimation techniques to define the edge strengths between nodes in a financial network. Our deep learning-based method for financial network analysis will both model identifying systemic risk, as well as determine the degree to which the cryptocurrency market contributes to the systemic risk.
Duration of internship: 3 months
Required skill set:
·      Econometrics
Project Title: The Cutter Incident and American Vaccine Hesitancy
Professor: Xu Lin (E-mail) - with Melinda Miller
Brief description:

In 1955, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was declared safe and effective.  The National Foundation for the Infantile Paralysis funded a free immunization program for children and contracted with six manufacturers to produce Salk’s vaccine.  One of these was Cutter Laboratories.  By the end of April of 1955, almost half a million doses of the Cutter vaccine had been shipped throughout the United States.  On April 24, there was a report of an infant developing paralysis after receiving the Cutter vaccine.  The CDC soon realized that an unprecedented crisis was occurring.  Two lots of the Cutter vaccines had been contaminated with live poliovirus.  The vaccine was immediately pulled from use.  However, 260 people had already contracted the disease, with almost 200 cases of paralysis and 11 deaths.  We plan to investigate if exposure to the contaminated Cutter polio vaccinations is associated with lasting distrust in the medical establishment and lower vaccination rates. In particular, we seek to identify the causal effects of the negative Cutter incident experience on various health related behaviors including other vaccine take-up later in life. We would like to hire a research assistant to collect the relevant (county level) data.
Duration of internship: 2 months
Required skill set:
        Excel
        Stata
Project Title:  The Economics of Prices in Pre-Modern China
Professor: Shaowen Luo (E-mail)
Brief description:

This project uses the Qing Grain Price data to study the effect of granary and the transmission of shocks in pre-modern China. In particular, we apply the dynamic spatial panel data model with heterogeneous coefficients to investigate the effects of weather, war and granary on grain price changes. The dataset contains 2.7 million observations that covers 339 prefectures at monthly frequency from early 1700 to early 1900, which gives us robustness to performance economic analysis. First, we will see whether the sensitivity of price changes in reaction to local shocks and shocks from nearby regions has any regional patterns. Second, we investigate the price dispersion in China from a historical perspective, taking advantage of the numerous border changes and political power divides that happened in the past. For example, consider the concessions during the late Qing Dynasty. For regions that were under the influence of a foreign power, did their prices become more different from nearby regions that were not occupied? And did regions far away from the central power report less reliable grain prices?
Duration of internship: June - July 2021
Required skill set: 
Data cleaning
Literature Review
Econometrics

Project Title: The Southern Homestead Act in Florida
Professor:  Melinda Miller (E-mail)
Brief description:

After the Civil War, Congress enacted a version of the 1862 Homestead Act that attempted to provide low-cost land to southern freedmen.  The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 (SHA) made 46 million acres of land in the five southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi open for homesteading.  Preference for homesteads was initially given to freedmen and Union loyalists.   Relatively little has been known about the SHA’s impact on black land ownership rates and the long run effect of homesteading on the formerly enslaved.  I have collected a sample of homesteading records and linked them to 1880 U.S. Census population and agricultural data.  For the next step of the project, I’d like to find out what happen to homesteading families later in their life.  To do this, we’ll be looking for them in the 1900 U.S. Census.  We’ll use the 1900 Census and genealogical records to find people. 
Duration of internship: 2 months
Required skill set:
          Excel

         Detective skills
Project Title: The Cutter Incident and American Vaccine Hesitancy
Professor: Melinda Miller (E-mail) with Xu Lin
Brief description:

In 1955, Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was declared safe and effective.  The National Foundation for the Infantile Paralysis funded a free immunization program for children and contracted with six manufacturers to produce Salk’s vaccine.  One of these was Cutter Laboratories.  By the end of April of 1955, almost half a million doses of the Cutter vaccine had been shipped throughout the United States.  On April 24, there was a report of an infant developing paralysis after receiving the Cutter vaccine.  The CDC soon realized that an unprecedented crisis was occurring.  Two lots of the Cutter vaccines had been contaminated with live poliovirus.  The vaccine was immediately pulled from use.  However, 260 people had already contracted the disease, with almost 200 cases of paralysis and 11 deaths.  The CDC began to issue weekly Poliomyelitis Surveillance Reports to track the incident.
     We are converting these reports to a machine readable file using a python-based OCR program.  We would like assistance in gathering the scanned reports from the CDC website, and then implementing the process of using Layout-Parser OCR software to convert the files from images to a data file.
Duration of internship: 2 months
Required skill set:

Python and big data experienced
Project Title: The Economics of International Sanctions Against Iran
Professor: Djavad Salehi-Isfahani (E-mail)
Brief description:

International sanctions have become a common tool in foreign policy for powerful nations, especially the United States.   Iran has been under more severe sanctions than any other country in recent memory.  This project produces two related products:
1.     A summary chapter/introduction for a series of articles prepared on various aspects of Iran’s economy under sanctions.  The aim is to introduce these articles for a special issue of a journal or for an edited book.  The articles are accessible at this site at SAIS/John Hopkins University.
2.     A series of blog posts to disseminate the content of these articles more widely.
The time spent on each component of the project will be approximately 75% on the blog posts and 25% on the special issue of a journal or book.  The required tasks will be of two types.  For the weekly blog, discussions and development of ideas and themes, assisting with data collection, and editing the blogs.  For the publishing part (publisher/journal still to be confirmed), the main task is to help edit the introductory chapter and contact reviewers and follow up with them.
     The student will learn about the economics of international sanctions and how they affect a country, how to prepare short articles for policy analysis. Depending on the level of contribution, the student may become a co-author.  The blog will be published in the policy portal of the Economic Research Forum and the Brooking Future Development.
Duration of internship: June 1 - August 1, 2021
Required skill set:
        Good Writing
Project Title: Labor Supply of Women in the Middle East
Professor:  Djavad Salehi-Isfahani (E-mail)
Brief description :

     This project addresses an important anomaly in the Middle East, namely that despite the rise of education and decline in fertility, Middle Eastern women’s participation rates are one-fourth that of men and much lower than other Muslim-majority countries, like Malaysia.
     The project examines the extent to which the low participation of women estimated from cross-section data underestimate increases that may have taken place for cohorts.  Year of birth (cohort) exerts an influence on labor supply independent of education and other characteristics that may be shared with other women from different cohorts. 
     The project uses survey data and STATA software to estimate models of cohort and lifetime labor supply.  The countries studied will include Iran and one or two other countries depending on data availability.
     The student will learn about the economics of labor supply in developing countries and how to apply data and econometric tools to address policy issues.
Duration of internship: June 1 - August 1, 2021
Required skill set:
Familiarity with Stata
Good writing skills
Project Title: Do Major Awards Suffer from Age, Gender and Other Biases
Professor: Sudipta Sarangi (E-mail)
Brief description:
Major awards, regardless of their field are a reflection of a society and its values. If one can uncover biases in a nation’s highest awards, it will not be a surprise to find that this exists at lower levels of performance and productivity evaluation. This project aims to build on existing data sets of major awards in the different fields of achievements like literature, movies and so on. Additional data to control for possible confounds may also need to be collected once the awards data are collected. Once the data is collected, we will look for evidence of different types of discrimination. The goal of this research will be to learn how we develop simple but interesting hypothesis using data that is publicly and easily available. The intern will likely be working with a group of other individuals engaged in other applied micro projects.
Duration of internship: June – July, 2021
Required skill set:
Excellent writing ability
Basic Econometric and data handling skills (nothing fancy required)
Data scraping expertise will be a big plus
Project Title: Investor Sentiment and Short-selling
Professor: Alec Smith (E-mail)
Brief description:

      A particular type of asset mispricing that involves both institutional and behavioral factors is the “short squeeze.” Short squeezes are associated with rapid, and sometimes spectacular, price run-ups during which prices significantly exceed fundamental value in a type of “bubble.” A recent prominent short squeeze event involved the stock of GameStop Co., during which a large number of retail (individual) investors coordinated via social media to implement a short squeeze against institutional (hedge fund) traders.
     This research will combine data analytics with behavioral experiments to develop an improved understanding of the mechanisms driving asset mispricing and short squeezes. The research will focus on the interaction of structural (e.g. short-sale constraints) and behavioral (e.g. extrapolation bias) considerations. The research will focus on three channels for identifying and understanding these factors in the context of short squeezes: financial data analytics, text sentiment, and experimental asset markets.
     The intern will assist with developing and conducting asset market experiments. Depending on skills and experience, the internship will also involve other aspects of the project, including experiment development, literature review, and data analysis.
Duration of internship: 2 months
Required skill set:
        Ability to work with a computer
        Familiarity with behavioral experiments in economics is preferred

        Experience with financial markets is preferred
        Programming skills (e.g. Python) are desireable but not required