Research Assistant Position

Hi, I’m Caliway Buchanan. I’m a junior double majoring in Economics and Business & Enterprise Management. I began working as a Research Assistant to Dr. Todd McFall during the fall semester of my sophomore year. I’ve worked on several research projects including the PGA Tour and college athlete recruitment. I’ve also prepared research for economic conference presentations. As a Research Assistant, I am always learning how to approach different types of problems and data. I’ve really enjoyed working with Dr. McFall and I’m glad that I became a Research Assistant

This summer I worked with Professor Mark Curtis on cleaning data and running regression models for a paper he is coauthoring, Unintended Environmental Consequences of Investment Stimulus Policy. The paper itself is about the unintended environmental consequences of “bonus depreciation,” one of the largest investment tax incentives in US history. The policy heavily subsidized capital and machinery investment by allowing them to more quickly write off these expenses from their taxable income. I looked specifically at whether the policy led firms to make investments in clean capital and participate in other energy-saving activities. I worked with multiple datasets from the Manufacturing Energy Consumption Survey (MECS). The first part of my work involved cleaning the data: collapsing all the data sets at unique NAICS codes listed in the MECS and converting the old manufacturing SIC codes in the 1994 data sets to the modern 4 digit NAICS codes using code in R. The next part of my research involved running difference in difference regression models to estimate  the effect of the tax policy on the number and percentage of manufacturing establishments participating in certain general energy management activities.  I then put those tables into Overleaf to produce clean and results that could be used  in the paper. I learned a lot this summer working with Professor Curtis, and I will continue to work with him on other research projects going into the Fall 2023 semester.

Hi, I’m Jasmine Xu and I am double majoring in Applied Math and Economy. I have been working as a Research Assistant in the Economy department since sophomore year. Economic research gives me the opportunity to explore relationships between each variable inside our society through the lens of Math. It is challenging, but meanwhile meaningful.