RAP
The Economics Research Assistant Program (RAP)
Harvard Economics is pleased to announce the inaugural round of our Research Assistant Program (RAP), made possible by the generous support of the David Grossman and Kate Tomford Endowment for Economics Undergraduate Research.*
RAP pairs successful Harvard undergraduate applicants with one of their preferred projects for a semester-long research assistant (RA) position (hours vary somewhat by project, and pay is typically around $18 / hour).
Please peruse the projects below and submit your application here by 8/16/2026. Application requires a resume and transcript. Project placements will be announced by midnight 8/26/2026, and RAships will begin around the week of 9/7/2026 (individual projects may deviate from this a little).
RAP is very much open to all Harvard undergrads who are on campus and enrolled in classes in Fall 2026.
RAP PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS - FALL 2026
Economic Misperceptions, Support for Redistribution, and Political Sectarianism in Lebanon (Augustin Bergeron): This project studies why extreme economic inequality in Lebanon has not generated stronger class-based politics or broader support for cross-sectarian redistribution. Using a representative survey of 3,300 adults in Greater Beirut and an embedded randomized experiment, we examine whether citizens misperceive economic differences across Christian, Sunni, and Shia communities, and whether correcting those beliefs changes support for redistributive policies, class identification, and sectarian political preferences and behavior. The research team consists of four faculty investigators with expertise in development economics, political economy, and experimental methods, working with a survey firm and civil-society partners in Lebanon. The undergraduate research assistant will contribute directly to the paper's final empirical phase by cleaning and organizing survey and experimental data; producing, checking, and documenting the full set of final tables and figures; conducting robustness, heterogeneity, and mechanism analyses; and helping maintain a transparent and reproducible analysis workflow. The RA may also help design, program, and monitor additional survey modules or follow-up data collection and may assist in coordinating that work with our survey partner in Lebanon. This project sits at the intersection of economics and political science, making it an excellent fit for students interested in interdisciplinary research. Average weekly hours: 5-10. Skills: Some experience with Stata and coursework in statistics and/or econometrics are preferred, but not required.
State Legitimacy, Taxation, and Resistance in Colonial Nigeria (Augustin Bergeron): This project studies how the legitimacy of the state shapes citizens' willingness to accept or resist government authority. We examine this question through taxation, a central and highly visible interaction between citizens and the state. Our setting is colonial Nigeria, where British rule replaced a widely recognized pre-colonial tax system in some areas with a colonial fiscal system that lacked the same foundations of legitimacy. Using more than 45,000 administrative documents, we study the consequences of this institutional change for attitudes toward taxation, complaints, and resistance to the colonial state. The project combines newly digitized historical sources, large-language-model-based text analysis, and spatial econometric methods. The RA will work closely with the two faculty PIs and a broader team of research assistants. Responsibilities will include producing and validating the paper's main empirical results; refining and modifying LLM prompts used to identify attitudes toward taxation, state legitimacy, and resistance in historical documents; conducting statistical analyses using the resulting LLM-based measures as outcomes; performing additional analyses and robustness checks; collecting, digitizing, and analyzing novel historical data; and reading and synthesizing relevant historical materials. The project lies at the intersection of economics, political science, and history and is especially well suited to a student interested in political economy, state-building, and development. Average weekly hours: 5-10. Skills: Some prior exposure to statistics (e.g. Stat 104/Stat 110/Ec 20)/econometrics and experience with Stata are preferred but not required.
AI Product Recommendations (Chiara Farronato*): Assist with the design, implementation, and analysis of online surveys related to consumer interactions with generative AI. Develop and test survey instruments in Qualtrics, clean and analyze survey data, and support statistical analyses. Write and maintain scripts to interact with APIs for multiple large language models, execute standardized prompt queries, collect and organize AI-generated responses, and assist in analyzing and documenting results for academic publication. Average weekly hours: 5. Skills: Stat 104/Ec 20/Stat 110, R fluency, Python fluency.
AI and Geopolitics (Gita Gopinath): The project will examine the intersection of AI and geopolitics, two of the most consequential forces shaping the global economy today. Although both issues are widely studied individually, their interaction and its impact on the global economy remain relatively unexplored. The project is therefore highly innovative and will seek to involve leading faculty working across these spaces. The RA would join a team led by Professor Gita Gopinath, whose work is supported by Valere Pierard, and will draw on the involvement of other Harvard faculty. The Research Assistant will be embedded in this team's day-to-day work, supporting faculty research on the project, drafting notes and memos, and participating actively in the team's ongoing discussions and workstreams. Average weekly hours: 6. Skills: Ec 1011b, Stata fluency.
Testing City Growth Diagnostic Tools (Ricardo Hausmann*): Through a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Ricardo Hausmann is leading a research project at the Growth Lab on developing practical economic tools to help city leaders and policy makers take real world granular spatial data and combine them with frameworks from the literature on Spatial Equilibrium and Economic Complexity to diagnose their city problems. We have developed a prototype version of the tool for US cities that we are testing for use with policy makers as well as advancing our research agenda on cities. The team is led by Ricardo Hausmann as Principal Investigator, 2 research managers, 4-5 research fellows and also collaborates with the Growth Lab's post-docs and digital development team. The role of the RA would be two-fold: (1) support data tasks related to aggregating, cleaning, and analyzing sub-national and city data for use in the tool and for publications, and (2) help the research team to use the tool to test its diagnostic implications and observe growth trends across US cities. The RA's role may lead to inputs for working papers or policy notes that emerge from the analysis. Average weekly hours: 1-2. Skills: Stat 104/Ec 20/Stat 110, Ec 1010a, Python fluency.
The Technological Origins of Objective Reporting in American Journalism (Quan Le*): This project examines whether U.S. newspapers became more objective and more informative after the Civil War, and whether falling printing costs and cheaper news collection (telegraph, AP/UP wires) drove that shift. The data combine structured newspaper panels (prices, circulation, pages, political affiliation), article-level text identifying wire content and linguistic measures of partisanship, AP subscription formulas, and predicted delivered newsprint prices constructed from newsprint-mill openings/closings. The RA will assemble and harmonize these sources, construct telegraph-cost and wire-adoption variables, implement the delivered-price model using existing mill data, build content measures from preprocessed text, and contribute directly to empirical analysis—estimating how cost shocks affect adoption, reporting intensity, and the move toward objective news. Average weekly hours: 10-15. Skills: Ec 1123/1126, Stat 104/Ec 20/Stat 110, Python fluency, general interest in coding, learning about historical datasets, and using these datasets in their own undergraduate theses.
A Libertarian Perspective on Public Policy (Jeffrey Miron): Writing first drafts of op-eds, blogs, and substacks that make the economic case for small government. Average weekly hours: 10-12. Skills: Strong interest in public policy.
Analyzing New Models of Psychology and Economic Theory (Matthew Rabin): I have been working out the implications of some recent formal models attempting to embed more realistic psychology into mainstream economic analysis. Such models attempt to rigorously capture various improvements to the psychological realism of economics (to include such things as errors in statistical reasoning and in interpreting other people's behavior, self-control problems, and the effects of expectations, self-image, and other beliefs have on our utility). I place special emphasis on working out the implications of new assumptions across contexts rather than selectively focusing on situations where the models happen to match the evidence. Potential research assistants would have some flexibility in choosing the existing models (by me and others) that interest them, and could contribute by (a) evaluating how existing empirical and experimental evidence accords to the predictions of these models, (b) analyzing the predictions of these new models across scenarios and writing up such analyses with guidance by me and other project members, or (c) helping create calculators and programs to streamline analysis of these models. Depending on student interest and current needs, there may also be opportunities to assist with current specific research papers in psychologically grounded economic theory. Average weekly hours: 10 (minimum). Skills: A strong background in microeconomic theory, math, and statistics is necessary; a background in psychology or behavioral economics could also be useful. Ec 1123/1126, Stat 104/Ec 20/Stat 110, Ec 1011a, R fluency, Python fluency, LaTeX/Overleaf.
Integrating Machine Learning into New Estimators for Policy Evaluation (Rahul Singh): Depending on interest and timing, we will select a project for the semester. Some options include: (i) how to estimate the effect of microfinance, using social network graphs as data; (ii) how to estimate product demand, using text and image embeddings as data. The RA will have the opportunity to conduct simulations and a real-world policy evaluation, in Python or R, using novel estimators that integrate machine learning into econometrics. Off-the-shelf statistical packages do not exist; the work will be to adapt code from different problems to our problem of interest. The RA should have a strong background in programming, a rigorous understanding of data science, and a curiosity for causal inference. We will meet one-on-one weekly. Average weekly hours: 10. Skills: Ec 1123/1126, Stat 104/Ec 20/Stat 110, R fluency, Python fluency.
Economics of Decarbonizing the U.S. Transportation Sector (James Stock): Transportation accounts for roughly 28% of total U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Within transportation, the majority of emissions come from light-duty vehicles (LDVs), followed by medium- and heavy-duty vehicles (MDVs and HDVs), aircraft, and marine vessels, with smaller contributions from rail, pipelines, and other sources. This project focuses on the economics of decarbonizing the first four of these—surface transportation and aviation. There are separate ongoing work streams on each of these. The stream on LDVs and MDVs is focused on electrification, specifically on the economics and policy of EV charging. The stream on HDVs focuses on the heterogeneity of truck routes, combining telemetric freight truck data with techno-economic analysis. The stream on aviation is focused on the economics and policy of sustainable aviation fuels. Tying these together is a focus on optimal policy design. This RA position would help to integrate these streams for one or more unifying papers, and to collect and analyze data relevant to connecting these different choices. The RA would work with various team members but would report directly to Prof. James Stock. Average weekly hours: Not specified. Skills: Stat 104/Ec 20/Stat 110. Stata fluency preferred but not essential.
International Sanctions and Chinese Innovation (Jaya Wen*): This project studies whether international sanctions on Russia changed the direction and intensity of Chinese innovation. The empirical strategy links variation in sanctions over time, by product code, and by source country to Chinese patenting activity using an HS6-IPC crosswalk and CNIPA patent data. The core hypothesis is that Chinese firms and inventors may increase research in technologies associated with products sanctioned in Russia, either because these products reveal areas of geopolitical vulnerability or because sanctions shift expectations about future supply-chain and technology restrictions. The research team will include the project faculty and coauthors, with the RA working closely with us on data construction and empirical analysis. RA responsibilities may include gathering, cleaning, and merging sanctions, trade, crosswalk, and patent data; implementing reproducible Stata workflows; running regressions and event studies; creating figures and tables; conducting robustness checks; and supporting targeted literature reviews. Average weekly hours: 5-10. Skills: Strong Stata skills are essential, and prior experience with applied econometrics, patent data, trade/product classifications, or large administrative datasets would be especially useful.
* For projects led by faculty whose appointment is outside the Economics Department, financial support is provided by other Economics Department sources of funds.