Partners : Research Fellowships

The QMSS research fellowship program, initiated in 2004, provides students with hands-on learning experience and the chance to interact and be mentored by leading social scientists at Columbia University and its affiliated institutions. Students awarded the fellowship work closely with an affiliated faculty member on the faculty member's research, giving students the opportunity to apply the tools and methodologies taught in the core curriculum to current, cutting-edge work in the social sciences. Participating students often use the data and research from these projects as the foundation for their theses.

At the beginning of the academic year, interested students may submit their résumés to participating faculty members. In order to ensure a proper fit, faculty members interview and select the students they feel have the relevant interests and skills for their project.

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2009-10 Trajectories, Tastes, and Network Structures of Elites

Trajectories, Tastes, and Network Structures of Elites

(TBD)

 Faculty Investigator: Shamus Khan, Department of Sociology

 

 

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2009-10 Sociology of Religion and Politics

Sociology of Religion and Politics

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator: Karen Barkey, Department of Sociology

 

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2009-10 Social Dynamics of Sexual Inititaion: A Complex Systems Approach

Social Dynamics of Sexual Initiation: A Complex Systems Approach

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator: Mark Orr, School of Public Health

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2009-10 Journalism Training on Business and Economic Reporting in Sub-Saharan Africa

Journalism Training on Business and Economic Reporting in Sub-Saharan Africa

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator:  Anya Schiffrin, SIPA

 
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2009-10 Investigating a 10-year Dataset on Individuals with Serious and Persistent Mental Illness

Investigating a 10-Year Dataset on Individuals with Serious and Persistend Mental Illness

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator: Robin Gearing, School of Social Work

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2009-10 Constitution and the Courts

Constitution and the Courts

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator: Nathaniel Persily, Law School

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2009-10 Clinical Trial Network/Brazil Family Health Program

Clinical Trial Network/Brazil Family Health Program

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator:  Rogerio Pinto, School of Social Work

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2009-10 China International Migration Project

China International Migration Project

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator: Yao Lu, Department of Sociology

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2009-10 Can small class sizes in childhood reduce health disparities in adulthood?

Can Small Class Sizes in Childhood Reduce Health Disparities in Adulthood?

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator: Peter Muenning, School of Public Health

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2009-10 Can physicians improve physician performance?

Can physicians improve physician performance?

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator: Elizabeth Ty Wilde, School of Public Health

 

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2009-10 Agent Based Modeling of Social Norms

Agent Based Modeling of Social Norms

Construction of a computational model of the spread and emergence of social norms in an adolescent social network. In our model, agents randomly distributed across a social network change their behavior based on the actions of others closest to them. Based on the updating of actions we show that complex systems of social norms are self-organizing, as well as self-perpetuating. We hope to improve on our modeling, making the decision processes of the agents more realistic, and testing the emergence of social norm behavior against school social network data. The goal of our research is to identify entry points for public health policy.

Faculty Investigator: Mark Orr, School of Public Health 

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2009-10 Aesthetic Categories in the Iberian Worlds: Networks, Productions, Inventions of Early Modernity

Aesthetic Categories in the Iberian Worlds: Networks, Productions, Inventions of Early Modernity

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator:  Alessandra Russo, Department of Spanish and Portugese

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2009-10 Advanced Methods in Understanding the Relationship among Mood, Drug Use Triggers, and Health among Gay Men in New York City

Advanced Methods in Understanding the Relationship among Mood, Drug Use Triggers, and Health among Gay Men in New York City

(TBD)

Faculty Investigator: Patrick Wilson, School of Public Health

 

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2008-09 Normalizing the Socialist Good Life: Consumption, Consumerism and Political Legitimacy in post-1968 Czechoslovakia

The full chapter is tentatively entitled “The Normalization of Consumption in Societal Perspective: Material Changes in Czechoslovakia, 1967-1984, and will be concerned with analyzing two sociological surveys that were requested by the Communist Party’s Central Committee, prepared according to international norms, and cleaned and filtered by professional sociologists, but never analyzed. What we will do is compare the published data from the first large-scale investigation of Czechoslovak society, undertaken in 1967 on over 13,000 subjects (and published in Pavel Machonín, et al. Československá společnost. Sociologická analýza sociální stratifikace (Bratislava: Epocha, 1969)) with the hitherto unused data from the similar study of over 17,000 subjects undertaken in 1978. Then we will compare the data from the 1978 study with that of the also unused data from a similar study of over 15,000 subjects in 1984. The questionnaires for these two surveys run to over 200 questions each, and cover a wide variety of social indicators, including asking specifically about the ownership of various kinds of consumer goods and consumption habits. The data will illustrate two important points. First, during the period of “High Normalization” (1968-1977) when the regime was trumpeting consumption and material comfort as an intrinsic part of socialism and the socialist way of life, the material comforts available to the population greatly expanded in several ways. Then, the data from 1984 will show along the same axes that this material expansion ceased as Czechoslovakia slipped into “Stagnant Normalization” (1977-1989).

As far as a Master’s thesis is concerned, there are several avenues that might be pursued, in terms of material changes in society, changes in social stratification, social mobility, assessments of life goals, and so on.

Faculty Investigator:  Bradley Abrams, Department of History

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2008-09 Long-Term Water Management in Response to Climate Change

This project is part of a multi-disciplinary effort to develop analytical tools to guide long-term water management and policy choices that are responsive and adaptive to the effects of climate change. In many rapidly growing regions of the world – where we face increasing demands for water supplies that are increasingly variable, both spatially and temporally – such management and policy tools are essential.  

The project developed statistical analysis tools that can be made available to policymakers, managers, or investors, to 1) help calculate the water supply risk profile of a given location and 2) identify, quantify and rank, via optimization models, water management investment strategies that will mitigate such risk for a region.   
      As background to the project,  an analysis of the key water supply and demand attributes that are critical for analyzing a region’s sensitivity to climate risk has been performed.  We have also collected data for a pilot-scale analysis in the semi-arid tropics of Andhra Pradesh in India to demonstrate the appropriateness of statistical methods for the assessment of climate risk and its mitigation. In the region under consideration, water storage and allocation issues are growing mainly due to the large-scale depletion of shallow groundwater resources and the degradation of surface water resources, both in terms of quantity and quality. Due to a lack of public sector investments in irrigation infrastructure, conflicts over how best to manage the available resources have arisen across scales there. Longitudinal data on ground water and surface water resources, types of water users, climate, demographic trends and agricultural production have been compiled over the last year and are readily available. The available data will be supplemented by GIS / remote sensing data. 

Faculty Investigator: Tanya Heikkila, School of International and Public Affairs

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2008-09 Evaluating Job Training for the Formerly Incarcerated

Evaluating Job Training for the Formerly Incarcerated

Working with data provided by a New York City-based non-profit, this project examined the effectiveness of a comprehensive employment services program designed to assist people returning to New York City from stays in prison and jail. The program is structured to help former inmates immediately after their release to provide rigorous pre-employment training, paid transitional work, job placement services, and long term retention services to help participants learn to work, obtain employment and stay employed. This study was conducted to evaluate the impact of post-employment services on employment retention among program participants.

Faculty Investigator:  Christopher Weiss, Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences; David Weiman, Department of Economics, Barnard College

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2008-09 Capital Flow and Balance of Payment in Emerging Markets

Capital Flow and Balance of Payment in Emerging Markets

The research aims to investigate the optimal level of international reserves for emerging economies through multivariate models and quantify its influences on domestic absorption to sudden stops and interest rate for the country's long-term debt. During our regular meetings with Professor and his PhD student, we discussed about plausible measurements for the probability and cost of sudden stop, and also the opportunity cost of holding reserves. I also assisted Professor to apply Probit model with various financial data sets of 16 emerging economies and predict their future level of international reserves with statistical software. I communicated with Professor about my findings both orally and in writing. 

Faculty Investigator: Guillermo Calvo, School of International and Public Affairs

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2007-08 Towards a 'More Perfect' Payments

Towards a 'More Perfect' Payments

The fellow's work is part of a larger research project to analyze how Civil War monetary-banking-fiscal policies affected both the means and mechanisms for making long-distance domestic payments, and in doing so forged a more integrated payments system, characterized by lower costs and risks in transferring funds over time.
The fellow's project examines the impact of the National Banking Acts
(1863-1865) reconfigured correspondent banking relations and caused the
greater centralization of correspondent relations and deposits in New York
City national banks, reinforcing the city's role as national money center.
The analysis focuses on New York state banks and examines how the adoption
of the NBAs caused many banks to shift their reserve agents-deposits from
Albany to New York.
Faculty investigator: David Weiman, Department of Economics, Barnard College

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2007-08 The Winds of Change

The Global Development of the Wind Energy Industry and the Environmental Movement

The main research question for this project is: why is it that, while wind power stands out as one of the splashiest success stories in renewable energy in some regions, it has failed to reach its true global potential and has developed unevenly in different parts of world?

The research assistant will have two main responsibilities. The first responsibility is to help with the development of databases that have organizations as units of analysis. The research assistant can choose to work on one or more of the databases created for this project. Basically, he/she will have to find additional dependent variables and merge new and existing files. The second responsibility is to analyze the data using event history analysis with Cox regression models –the dependent variable being the “risk” of buying RECs, recorded as the year when the organization made the decision to buy RECs. In the past I have used the SAS statistical software for this type of analysis, but the research assistant also has the option of using SPSS or STATA for this task.

The research assistant will benefit in two ways from working on this project. First, he/she will have the opportunity to co-author a paper that will be published in a major sociology journal. I estimate that the article will be submitted for publication sometime next summer. Second, he/she will have the opportunity to develop a master’s thesis based on this research experience. For example, the research assistant could write a thesis that examines why companies “go green”, or a thesis that focuses on the greening of colleges and universities or local governments. These are important research questions that have received relatively little attention in the sociological literature on organizations.

Faculty investigator: Ion Bogdan Vasi, School of International and Public Affairs
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2007-08 Soybeans and the Weather

Linking Soybean Yields to Weather Outcomes in Brazil

While there has been a lot of research on this subject, the novelty would be to look for break-points in the non-linear relationship between yields and temperature. Professor Schlenker has done this in the US already, and yields start to rapidly decline once temperatures exceed 29C, which has strong implications for climate change. The fellow's tasks would be
1) to help get the yield data ready for analysis (the Brazilian Census is publicly available, and knowledge of Portuguese would come in handy)
2) Link it to weather outcomes
3) Run regression, starting with a simple panel and then advancing it from there.

Faculty investigator: Wolfram Schlenker, School of International and Public Affairs
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2007-08 Social Reproduction

The Influence of Social and Structural Contexts on Children's Cognitive Development and How they Fuel Social Reproduction

The specific tasks to be completed depend in part on the Fellow’s initial skills, and the expertise they develop during the course of their QMSS program. The overarching goal would be for the student to complete a solid quantitative study for which they would have primary responsibility. This may or may not become the student’s master’s thesis. The tasks
involved are those that accompany any quantitative study: situating the study within a theoretical framework; selecting appropriate analytic samples; conducting both descriptive and analytic analyses; and presenting findings in logical visual and written formats. The Fellow would also have the opportunity to present this paper—and others on which we might collaborate—at major national conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, the American Educational Research Association, and American Evaluation Association.

Faculty investigator: Doug Ready, Teachers College

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2007-08 Rockefeller Drug Laws Case Study

The Rise in Incarceration Associated with the Implementation of the Rockefeller Laws

Recent research on the rise of the current incarceration regime in the United States has examined the effects of political realignments and changes in sentencing policies. In this analysis, we extend this research by examining the differential impact of what we label “higher order” policies, such as the creation of sentencing laws, with the implementation of such policies at the grass roots level. Using the implementation of New York State’s Rockefeller Drug Laws as a case study, we examine how the development and implementation of these laws contributed to a rise in the incarcerated population. Our preliminary analysis indicates that while the passage of the Rockefeller Laws was a necessary condition for a rise in the incarcerated population, it was not sufficient. Moreover, our preliminary analysis also shows evidence of the importance of predicate or second felony offender laws on the growth of the prison population.

Faculty investigator: Christopher Weiss, Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences; David Weiman, Department of Economics, Barnard College

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2007-08 Do NPO Actions Promotion of Entrepreneurship in Africa Produce Results?

The main question is: What actions undertaken by NPOs, international institutions and CSR departments of large corporations, in the area of promotion of entrepreneurship in Africa, deliver measurable and significant results?

The fellow will do web research, as well as research on donated material, of NPOs and institutions who claim to provide aid to entrepreneurs in an attempt to analyze actual provisions of such aid. In the later stages of the research the fellow will design surveys and econometric tests to analyze these claims.

Faculty investigator: Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Department of Economics
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2006-07 Vouchers and Private School Entry

Vouchers and Private School Entry 2006-07

This project addresses two questions regarding ChileÂ’s educational market.
First, what effect does private school entry have on the sorting of students across public and private schools within local markets? For example, does the entry of a private school induce “cream-skimming,” under which the highest-income or ability students exit public schools? Second, what effect does private school entry have on the net outcomes of students within local markets? Do average outcomes rise because of the salutary effects of competition, or do they fall because sorting has deleterious effects on some students?

Faculty Investigator: Miguel Urquiola, Department of Economics/School of International and Public Affairs; Patrick McEwan, Department of Economics, Wellesley College

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2006-07 Socio-Economic Outcomes of Unwanted Children

Socio-Economic Outcomes of Unwanted Children 2006-07

The research project explores the relationship between the availability of fertility control and social and economic outcomes of children in developing countries. The unique history of abortion legislation in Romania - a "special case" in the field of demography and reproductive behavior - provides an excellent opportunity to study the effects of access to abortion and contraceptives on child outcomes. Using a number of new and unique datasets mostly from the Ministry of Education in Romania, this analysis will examine in detail detail the school performance of a cohort of children born around the time of a second change in reproductive health legislation.

Faculty Investigator: Cristian Pop-Ecchles, Department of Economics/School of International and Public Affairs

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2006-07 Political Geography: Explaining Trade Protection in the U.S.

Political Geography: Explaining Trade Protection in the U.S.

This work draws on research from the previous year's project, which showed that political representatives are encouraged to provide assistance in the form of tariffs to declining industries because they are credibly assured that additional output in those industries will remain in their district, using existing plant and facilities. This research project applies that argument to trade protection in the United States. The methodological interest of the project is that it required merging geographic data on industry location and industry characteristics with political geography data on Congressional districts.

Faculty investigator: Lucy Goodhart, Department of Political Science

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2006-07 Export Responses to Real Exchange Rate Fluctuations

Export Responses to Real Exchange Rate Fluctuations


This research project studies how responsive export flows are to changes
in real exchange rates and if this response differs with the size of the real
exchange rate movement, the margin of production, and the type of exported
good. This evidence can shed light on the theoretical literature that tries to disentangle the main response channels and mechanisms activated during real depreciations.

Faculty investigator: Mariana Colacelli, Department of Economics, Barnard College

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2005-06 What are the Effects of Loans from Microcredit Organizations on Borrowing Households

What are the Effects of Loans from Microcredit Organizations on Borrowing Households 2005-06

This project focused on the effects of loans provided by microcredit organizations have on borrowing households. Using a methodology that accounts for selection bias, this project examined the impact of credit offered through the type of contract most popular among microcredit organizations, the group contract.

Faculty Investigator: 

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2005-06 What are the Drivers of Economic Performance?

What are the Drivers of Economic Performance? 2005-06

This project re-examined the long-term underlying drivers of economic performance in a large cross section of countries. Seeking to develop concepts distinct from the commonly used notion of average growth, the project examined episodes of economic failure and success, and how these relate to economic reforms as well as geographic/ecological factors, conflict incidence and quality of institutions.

Faculty Investigator: 

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2005-06 Political Consequences of Social Inequality

Political Consequences of Social Inequality 2005-06

This project examined the political consequences of social inequality, particularly its potential role as a source of social stress. Using vast panel data sets from the UK and Germany containing individual level information on income and consumption as well as on political attitudes and life satisfaction, this research explored the political consequences of the rise in income inequality of the past 20-30 years.

Faculty Investigator: 

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2005-06 Do Peacekeepers Keep Peace?

Do Peacekeepers Keep Peace? 2005-06

This project examines the empirical effects of international peacekeeping in civil wars. The central question of this project is whether peacekeeping is effective in keeping peace. That is, does peace last longer when international peacekeepers are deployed than when belligerents are left to their own devices to implement a cease-fire?

Faculty Investigator: 

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2004-05 Under What Conditions Do States Die?

Under What Conditions Do States Die? 2004-05

This project asks a fundamental question for international relations: under what conditions do states die? Fazal argues that geography plays a key role in determining state survival and death. Using the emerging technology of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), this project collected and analyzed historical data on terrain roughness for states in the international system over the past 200 years.

Faculty investigator: Tanisha Fazal, Department of Political Science 

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2004-05 The Role of Non-Profits in Social Service Provision in NYC

The Role of Non-Profits in Social Service Provision in NYC 2004-05

This fellowship is part of a larger study researching the role of nonprofits in providing government-funded social services in New York City. Using data from a public database of contracts for social service provision and new spatial analysis tools, she is particularly interested in the inequity in distribution of agencies and funds and what factors are related to over- and under-representation.

Faculty investigator: Nicole Marwell, Department of Sociology

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2004-05 Political Economy of Local School Expenditures

Political Economy of Local School Expenditures 2004-05

This project examaines questions related to the political economy of local public school expenditures in the United States. States and districts vary by direct versus representative voting and local versus state control in how school expenditure levels are determined. Reback's empirical work investigates whether there are important interactions between these political institutions and other factors, such as demographic trends, that influence public school expenditures.

Faculty investigator: Randall Reback, Department of Economics, Barnard College

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2004-05 Circumstances Leading to Parent and Child Health in Fragile Families

Circumstances Leading to Parent and Child Health in Fragile Families 2004-05

The QMSS Research Fellow analyzed data from the Fragile Families study, which follows a birth cohort of (mostly) unwed parents and their children over a five-year period. The study is designed to provide new information on the capabilities and relationships of unwed parents, as well as the effects of policies on family formation and child wellbeing. The research project examined narrative accounts (rather than traditional survey-based methods) of the circumstances leading to parent and child health in a subsample of the Fragile Families sample.

Faculty investigator:

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Here are some sample projects and descriptions: