Anthony T

- Research Program Mentor

Project ideas

Comparative tax policy

Few topics in economics get people riled up as much as taxes. Why do some countries have higher taxes than others? How does taxation affect business activity and consumer welfare? What are the arguments for progressive versus flat-rate taxation? More generally, what trade-offs are involved in making economic policy, and how should we weigh our sometimes competing concerns for economic growth, equality, and stability? For a sample deliverable: write a policy memo on why the U.S. should or shouldn't follow other developed countries in adopting a value-added tax (VAT).

History of globalization

Examine the history of global trade and how narratives around trade and economic interdependence have evolved in the last two centuries. Students can use data and figures to highlight the growth of trade in the era of globalization. Alternatively, they can focus on some of the broader qualitative questions—drawing on politics, sociology, and philosophy, in addition to economics—that have been at the heart of debates over free trade and national sovereignty going all the way back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

Financial forecasting and efficient markets

Learn how financial assets (e.g., stocks and bonds) are priced on markets, and how investors construct portfolios out of different assets and asset classes. Then use R or Python to analyze and visualize financial data, and to build rudimentary predictive models that attempt to forecast asset prices. Students can use these models to take a first pass at evaluating the validity of the so-called "efficient-market hypothesis," the idea that asset prices accurately reflect all public information and that attempting to consistently "beat the market" is a fool's errand.

Coding skills