Projects for the Dedicated Research Fellow Track

Explore this year’s projects below. Our application opens Thursday, September 3, 2026.

When you apply to the Research Fellows Program, you can select the dedicated track and choose up to three projects of interest.

Open projects are listed on this page and organized by their primary field of study, though projects are often multidisciplinary. We encourage you to look at projects within your chosen field as well as in related fields.

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Accounting

Stanford Tax Lab (STAX): Accounting

Faculty: Rebecca Lester

Status: Open

Rebecca Lester, Associate Professor of Accounting, is looking for predoctoral research fellows to conduct accounting research with the Stanford Tax Lab (STAX). Fellows will work directly with Professor Lester in a highly collaborative team environment, which encompasses postdoctoral researchers and PhD students in accounting and economics. Our research examines a wide range of topics in taxation at the international, federal, and local levels. Potential topics include mapping complex multinational corporate structures; how firms and governments respond to tax policy across jurisdictions, including cross-border income shifting, tax competition between countries, and state and local tax policy within the U.S.; the effects of R&D tax incentives on innovation and growth; and the emerging fiscal impacts of AI adoption. Work will involve detailed and careful empirical analysis using Stata, Claude Code, and GitHub; literature reviews; and theoretical modeling to analyze the welfare effects of tax policies. For more information about STAX, visit our website at https://stax.stanford.edu/.

Requirements
A background in public economics or accounting is not required but helpful, as well as a curiosity about how fiscal policy shapes firm behavior.

Economic Analysis & Policy

Stanford Tax Lab (STAX): Economics

Faculty: Juan Carlos Suarez Serrato

Status: Open

Juan Carlos Suarez Serrato, The Edward B. Rust Professor of Economics, is looking for predoctoral research fellows to conduct economics research with the Stanford Tax Lab (STAX). Fellows will work directly with Professor Suárez Serrato in a highly collaborative team environment, which encompasses postdoctoral researchers and PhD students in economics and accounting. Our research examines a wide range of topics in taxation at the international, federal, and local levels. Potential topics include analyzing complex multinational corporate structures in the context of international tax policy, the economic impact of environmental regulations, the effects of R&D tax incentives on innovation and growth, the administration of fiscal policy in developing countries, and the labor market impacts of business taxes and incentives. Work will involve detailed and careful empirical analysis using Stata, Claude Code, and GitHub; literature reviews; and structural modeling to analyze the welfare effects of tax policies. Some projects could involve analyzing large administrative datasets from Census and IRS. For more information about STAX, visit our website at https://stax.stanford.edu/.

Empirical Market Design for Transforming Marketplaces

Faculty: Shoshana Vasserman

Status: Open

Shoshana Vasserman, Associate Professor of Economics, is looking for a predoctoral research fellow to work with her on ongoing research projects involving the empirical evaluation and design of policies for changing marketplaces. Technology is changing how age-old markets work in countless ways. It is also changing the tools that market designers can use to make them work better. Possible project topics include congestion pricing for road use and supply and demand frictions for homeowners insurance under natural disaster risk. The fellow will be expected to contribute to the different aspects of empirical work involved in the project, including data management, munging, visualization, simulation, and basic econometrics. Pending interest, there will be ample opportunity to learn and apply more advanced computational techniques as well as economic theory.

Finance

Global Capital Allocation Project

Faculty: Matteo Maggiori

Status: Open

Matteo Maggiori, The Moghadam Family Professor and Professor of Finance is looking for a predoctoral research fellow to join the Global Capital Allocation Project (GCAP) Lab, under his supervision. GCAP combines data, economic theory, and analytics to understand how capital moves around the world, with the aim of improving international economic policy. Current projects include mapping how global firms finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, understanding capital allocation and financial integration in the Eurozone, examining China's rising presence in global financial markets, and studying the interplay between geopolitics and economic statecraft. The role involves big data applications in international macroeconomics and finance, with the results carrying policy implications and potential media attention. The position offers close collaboration with faculty, PhD students, and fellow researchers, along with opportunities to present findings and gain research training. More information is available on the Lab's website: www.globalcapitalallocation.com. This role offers the opportunity to explore the world of global capital allocation and help shape international economic policy.

Requirements
Applications are welcomed from candidates with a strong quantitative background, excellent programming skills, and a passion for economic research, with or without prior economics experience.

Dedicated Research Fellow Position

Faculty: Vikrant Vig

Status: Open

Vikrant Vig, the William R. Timken Professor and Professor of Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) is looking for a predoctoral research fellow to support research on asset quality, pricing, and reallocation over the business cycle. Current work uses transaction-level post-sale flying-hour measures to study recession-period quality loss and asset reallocation, develops Delta-method standard errors for effective-age estimation, and examines recession-period price discounts using alternative recession definitions and continuous measures of industry distress. The fellow will support the construction and analysis of transaction-level data and the associated empirical and econometric work. The fellow will also assist in other projects related to financial regulation.

Organizational Behavior

Models and Empirical Studies in Cultural Evolution

Faculty: Helena Miton

Status: Open

Helena Miton, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior is looking for a predoctoral research fellow to work on cultural evolution, meaning how information changes as it passes from person to person and across generations. Depending on interests, the fellow might re-analyze published experiments, design and run new experiments and data collection, or build computational models of how knowledge is passed on and compare their predictions with real-world cases. The role involves collecting and cleaning large datasets, running data analyses, synthesizing literature, building or extending computational models, producing clear figures and tables, and writing and testing reproducible code.

Requirements
Some background in statistics or data analysis (R or Python) is expected, and prior exposure to mathematical or computational modeling is a plus but not required.

Didn’t Find What You Were Looking For?

We are not currently offering dedicated positions in the Marketing, OIT (Operations, Information & Technology), and Political Economy fields. Additional projects may be added as they become available.

If you did not find a project within your field or another project of interest to you, you can explore the Standard Track, which follows a rotational model that allows you to gain experience across multiple fields and eventually specialize in one field of interest.

Standard Track

Rotate between projects with different faculty each quarter based on project availability and your interest.