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.

Tim de Silva, Assistant Professor of Finance, is looking for a predoctoral research fellow who will be engaged in research on various topics within household finance, macroeconomics, behavioral economics, and public finance. Ongoing projects include topics such as the macroeconomic implications of frictions that lead to suboptimal decision-making, the optimal design of mortgage and student loan contracts, the determinants of households' housing and portfolio choice decisions, the implications of demographic change for households’ financial decisions, and the public finance implications for households’ health investments.

The fellow will contribute to this research through a variety of tasks, which may include collecting, managing, and cleaning large administrative datasets; implementing econometric analyses such as differences-in-differences and regression discontinuity designs; and developing and maintaining codebases to solve, simulate, and estimate dynamic quantitative economic models in C++ and Fortran. The role will also involve optimizing code for high-performance computing environments, conducting literature reviews, and supporting administrative aspects of the research, such as organizing citations, preparing manuscripts for publication, and managing codebases. The fellow can expect to work in a team setting and will have the opportunity to collaborate with other faculty members, PhD students, and fellows within the Stanford community, as well as those at several other universities, including MIT.

Requirements
The ideal candidate will have a strong quantitative background with training in economics or a related field such as statistics, computer science, or engineering, along with exceptional programming skills in Stata, R, or Python and the ability to work independently on research tasks. Previous research experience is a plus, and the position is well suited for those considering graduate study in economics, finance, or related disciplines. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States for the duration of the appointment and must also meet the Census Bureau’s residency requirement of having resided in the U.S. for at least three years as of June 30, 2025, in order to work with Census restricted-use data. Please indicate in your statement of purpose whether you meet these work authorization and residency requirements.

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.

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), (with collaboration and shared RF exposure alongside Prof. Amit Seru) is looking for predoctoral research fellows to work across several new projects at the intersection of AI, organizational design, and institutions. RFs will gain broad exposure to diverse research agendas and methods.

Example project streams:
- AI and the organization of work: How are large language models changing job content, delegation, and decision rights inside firms? This stream includes a collaboration with an engineering faculty colleague on classic design questions—delegation, centralization, decentralization—using rich firm-level data (including a proprietary Infosys dataset available to Stanford collaborators).

- Technology and judicial efficiency in India: Can AI meaningfully reduce court backlogs and improve case resolution? We will build and evaluate LLMs on a corpus of Indian law, analyze where models succeed and fail, and assess implications for accuracy, bias, and consistency in judicial decision-making.

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. Vig with collaboration/exposure to Prof. Seru 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.

Zhiguo He, the James Irvin Miller Professor of Finance, is looking for a predoctoral research fellow who will be engaged in research on a number of different topics including government debt, fiscal policy, inflation, default, and bank hedging.