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Are you interested in serving as a Research Assistant?  If so, there are several projects (some listed below, some not) that have opportunities for advanced undergraduates and recent bachelor's graduates.  Note that no support will be offered to persons without work authorization or student status in the United States.  Current University of Richmond undergraduates should look at Richmond Guarantee funding.

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  • Indian Indentureship Digitization

    I collect and digitize records on Indian indentureship (1838-1917) to various locations around the world.  This unique database of historical microdata for over 250,000 people allows me to study caste and selection, initial and subsequent migration decisions, and how well string-matching methods compare against a gold standard of administratively linked data.  Data include
     

    • British Guiana (Guyana):  entrants (limited sample); list of ships (Excel download)

    • Dutch Guiana (Suriname):  all entrants

    • Fiji:  all entrants, deaths, and repatriations

    • Jamaica:  entrants (limited sample)

    • Natal (South Africa):  all entrants

    • Trinidad:  all entrants 1860-1889; remittances (limited sample); land titling (limited sample)

      Overall:  presentation on sex ratios (PDF download)

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  • Developing Nations' Tax Capacity (with Joel Slemrod, Luis Alejos, Guylaine Nouwoue, Bassirou Sarr, Tejaswi Velayudhan)

    We study tax policies and issues of delinqency, evasion, and fiscal capacity in multiple developing countries in Latin America/Caribbean and west Africa.
     

  • Land mines and development in Mozambique (with Tyler Belyea)

    This project takes land mine surveys in Mozambique and links areas to agricultural survey data in order to examine various impacts of land mine clearance, including market access and agricultural investment.
     

  • Rural areas and structural change in the US Midwest

    This project utilizes individual- and county-level data on the labor force and production from the start of the 20th century onwards in order to examine how structural transformation in agriculture affected long-run development.
     

  • Income Dynamics Lab (with Raj Arunachalam, Gaurav Khanna, Nafisa Lohawala, Ajay Shenoy, Tejaswi Velayudhan)

    This research group (1) creates and combines Census data, nationally representative samples, and historical records from India and (2) studies long-run changes and household-level income dynamics.
     

  • Asian American Sex Selection (with Brian Citro, Sital Kalantry, Arindam Nandi)

    We study sex ratios of Asians in the United States using national survey data from the late 20th century - present.  We document and assess the magnitude of changing sex ratios from the 1990s - 2000s - 2010s.
     

  • Foreign Workers in (West) Germany

    I use administrative data from West Germany/Germany to study wage differentials and assimilation between foreign and native workers from 1975 - 2000s.

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