Collaborative Research

2020

• Supported by a faculty-student summer research collaborative grant, Professor Liang Ding and Jianyang Li ’22 (Chongqing, China) examined if offering finance classes at liberal arts colleges helps students find jobs in the financial industry using the data extracted from LinkedIn.
• Professor Amy Damon and Hannah Whipple ’21 (Corvallis, OR) worked together on a faculty-student summer research collaborative grant to build on Khadidja Ngom’s ’19 (Kaolack, Senegal) thesis examining the effect of polygyny on land inheritance practices in Uganda.
• Professor Mario Solis-Garcia, together with Federico Chung ’21 (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Liam Purkey ’21 (Portland, OR) worked to estimate the size and properties of the shadow economy for a large number of countries. This collaboration resulted in a working paper and a freely-available dataset. (Incidentally, this is based on earlier work by Professor Solis-Garcia and AnnieYingtong Xie ’15.)
• Supported by a faculty-student summer research collaborative grant, Professor Felix Friedt and Matt (Kaichong) Zhang ’21 (Foshan, China) investigated the effects of COVID-19 on Chinese exports. They find that three of the hypothesized channels (1. domestic supply; 2. foreign demand; 3. GVC contagion) contribute to the disruption of international trade and that the shock to Global Value Chains (i.e. GVC contagion) is the primary determinant. As a result, the pandemic effects are distinctly different from other large trade shocks, such as the 2008-09 financial crisis, and require policy makers to consider alternative regulatory responses that focus on the resilience of and dependence on global supply chains. This research has been published in Covid Economics: Vetted and Real-Time Papers, issue No. 53 available here: https://cepr.org/content/covid-economics-vetted-and-real-time-papers-0
• Professor Gabriel Lade and Ash Ma ’21 (Xi’an, China), together with alumni Claire Buehler ’20 (Houston, TX), worked in Summer 2020 on a research project examining the effects of a public gasoline price aggregator website (https://fuelgr.gr/) on the competitiveness of gasoline stations in Greek cities.  The project included compiling detailed, geocoded consumer search data with alternative geographical measures of market competitiveness.
• Professor Gabriel Lade and Federico Chung ’21 (Buenos Aires, Argentina) worked in Summer 2020 on a research project studying conservation effects of updated billing formats on water use in the City of Edina, MN.  Lade and Chung partnered with the City to study household-level water consumption patterns over time, and explore whether the city’s investment in new meter technology changed households’ water use.

2019

• Professor Sarah West and Vergi Agustini ’19 (Bali, Indonesia) examined the effect of the Minneapolis BLUE line light rail on land use change down connecting arterial streets.
• Professor Liang Ding and Xilin Niu ’21 (Wuhan, China) worked together on a faculty-student summer research collaborative grant to explore a momentum-based multiple timeframe trading strategy in the stock market.
• Over the summer of 2019, Professor Felix Friedt and Esther Swehla ’20 (Claremont, CA) worked together on linking nearly 1,000,000 spatially disaggregated residential noise complaints with demographic neighborhood characteristics as well as local real estate transactions from 2006 through 2017. Funded by a Wallace Summer Research grant, our work culminated in a novel dataset that is perfectly suited to evaluate the adverse physical and mental health effects of aircraft noise pollution over a larger geography that goes beyond the restrictive contour plots published for the Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport. Our preliminary results indicate that noise pollution, measured via resident noise complaints, creates considerable adverse health effects that are capitalized in economically significant home value discounts extending far beyond the federal threshold of what is considered ‘significant’ aircraft noise pollution.
• Over the summer of 2019, Professor Felix Friedt and Daijiro Yokota ’20 (Tokyo, Japan) received a faculty-student summer research grant that funded a 10-week collaborative research effort to study the impact on international natural disasters on Japanese industries. Using the World Input-Output Table (WIOT) database to pin down the global supply chain linkages between Japanese industries and foreign countries exposed to natural disasters, Professor Friedt and Daijiro Yokota developed a new measure of the exposure of Japanese industries to natural disaster risk. While the research is still ongoing, Daijiro has since graduated and landed a local marketing analyst position. According to him, the research experience was a major talking point during his job interviews.

2018