The summer research projects are designed to give the interns an understanding of and spur interest in business research. The research in the business school is highly interdisciplinary and spans many disciplines outside of the traditional areas of accounting, finance, management, marketing, and operations research. These include, but are not limited to, economics, psychology, sociology, political science, computer science, engineering, statistics, and data science.
Previous projects in Accounting, Economics, and Finance typically require interns with strong backgrounds in econometrics. Some project may require students to have more specialized skills in data science and computer science. While some projects may require interest in legal, regulatory, and policy issues. Past accounting projects have studied US hedge funds and their relation to sovereign debt, corporate transparency and firm communication, and investigations in shareholder voting. Economics projects span the areas of development economics, labor economics, industrial organization (I/O), monetary policy, and macroeconomics. Finance projects have investigated the efficiency of capital markets, corporate finance theory, impact of financial shocks on innovation, structure of company boards.
Projects in the Decision, Risk, & Operations (DRO) division are well suited to interns who major in engineering, computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics. DRO professors have looked at how to optimize patient flow through hospitals and ICUs, market matching, optimizing school admissions and public housing assignments.
The Management and Marketing divisions offer opportunities to both behavior researchers, in sociology and psychology, and quantitative researchers. In management, researchers have investigated the effects of power in hierarchy in organizations, decision making in organizations, effect of gender and diversity in organization, field experiments in hiring, and negotiations. Management projects that require more advanced statistics or applications of machine learning may include gender pay equity in the UK, or exploring the foundations of creativity and success in music. Recent projects in quantitative marketing include studies of the effect of video game lotteries on consumers, developing a method to impose ethical constraints on decisions, and predicting churn from social media (Twitter) data.