Projects for the Dedicated Research Fellow Track

Matteo Maggiori, The Moghadam Family Professor and Professor of Finance, and Antonio Coppola, Assistant Professor of Finance, are recruiting several pre-doctoral research fellows to be part of the Global Capital Allocation Project (GCAP) Lab. The research fellow positions are based at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. You can find out more about the Lab's work on their website: www.globalcapitalallocation.com.

A substantial component of the work focuses on big-data applications in international macroeconomics and finance. The GCAP Lab mixes data, economic theory, and analytics to understand how capital moves around the world with the aim of improving international economic policy. Current projects include, for example: (i) mapping how global firms finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, often shell companies in tax havens; (ii) understanding capital allocation and financial integration in the Eurozone; (iii) understanding China’s rising presence in global financial markets; and (iv) understanding how geopolitics and economic statecraft work.

The research fellows will be dedicated to Professors Maggiori and Coppola but will also work closely and directly with all members of the lab, including other lab co-directors such as Jesse Schreger at Columbia Business School, co-authors on academic papers, PhD students, and other research assistants. This is a vibrant community with plenty of interaction and the expectation of working collaboratively in smaller groups and then presenting research progress to the broader group.

Applications will be considered on a rolling basis, and short-listed applicants will be contacted by late October to complete a technical exercise and a remote interview.

Requirements
A bachelor’s degree or its equivalent, a strong quantitative background, excellent computer programming skills, and a serious interest in pursuing research in economics. A background in economics is helpful but not necessary. Previous research experience is a plus. For one of the positions, U.S. citizenship may be prioritized during the selection process due to the nature and requirements of some administrative datasets.

Amit Seru, The Steven and Roberta Denning Professor of Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), (with collaboration and shared RF exposure alongside Prof. Vikrant Vig) is looking for predoctoral research fellows to work on projects at the intersection of household finance, fintech/big tech entry, regulation, and the industrial organization of intermediation. RFs will gain broad exposure to complementary research agendas and methods.

Example project streams:
- Fintech/big tech and consumer choice: How do new platforms, pricing models, and recommendation engines shape borrowing, saving, and payments behavior? What are the welfare and distributional implications?

- Regulation and market structure: Evaluating how supervisory and rule changes (e.g., competition, consumer protection, capital/liquidity) reallocate activity across banks, nonbanks, and platforms.

- Technological change in intermediation: Mapping how innovation reshapes the production of financial services—pricing, matching, pass-through—and feeds back into household outcomes.

RFs will build and maintain large, linked datasets (administrative, proprietary, text/disclosures); clean, merge, and document them; and run empirical analyses (panel methods, DiD/event studies, IV/matching). As needed, RFs will implement Python workflows for parsing and basic NLP, with R/Stata for econometrics. RFs will also synthesize literature, produce clear tables/figures, draft short memos that translate results into economic intuition and policy relevance, and keep reproducible codebases.

Requirements
Strong Python and SQL (basic NLP a plus) skills and competence in R or Stata, comfort with identification in observational settings, and a careful, organized, curious mindset aimed at policy-relevant research and a future PhD. RFs will receive close mentorship from Prof. Seru with collaboration/exposure to Prof. Vig and coauthors, work on frontier questions in household finance, fintech, and intermediation using real-world data at scale, and build a portfolio of research-grade code and analyses.