This summer I worked alongside Professor Kagy in the Economics Department on a project titled “Poor Bargaining? Theory and Evidence on How and Why Liquidity Affects Price Negotiations.” We worked alongside two other co-authors, Morgan Hardy (NYU – Abu Dhabi) and Lena Song (NYU). Our project, centered in Ghana, looks at the bargaining patterns of garment makers.

In many developing countries, the process of purchasing a garment requires haggling between the seller and the buyer.  For the sellers, how they haggle directly affects their income, so the concept of bargaining is very important in developing countries. Classic economic bargaining models only take into account seller cost and buyer value, and we are interested in if a person’s liquidity (availability of liquid assets) affects how they bargain. Our theory is that those with lower liquidity feel more constrained and thus offer lower prices during bargaining because they urgently need the sale.

Our paper consists of a theoretical section in which we model bargaining with an added liquidity constraint, as well as observational evidence of this from our data. We are working with data that Professor Kagy and her co-authors took themselves in January of 2018, in which we surveyed 312 small garment firm owners about their business and personal characteristics. In the survey, we included a bargaining exercise where we asked to purchase a shirt and haggled over the price. From this, we can test the relationship between the final price and the personal liquidity of the garment maker. What we found is a clear positive relationship between liquidity and final price in the bargaining exercise. Those with higher liquidity charge significantly higher prices than those with lower liquidity, which supports our theory that people with higher liquidity feel less constrained.

I have learned so much this summer about the process of designing surveys, conducting research, programming in STATA and Latex, cleaning data, and creating figures for statistical use. I am very grateful for this opportunity and hope to continue conducting research in the future.

This summer, I worked with Professor Su on the topic of Chinese resource export in global developing countries. The study was a supplement for Professor Su’s paper on Chinese export and the case of resource curse of developing country. I was responsible for writing the case study in his paper.

We spent most of our first 2 weeks find the most appropriate subject for study. After we were certain that our case will be on Zambia, a country that was heavily invested by Chinese companies, we analyzed the economic and political situations that the Zambian government faces before and after the Chinese influences started to go their way in Zambia. We set the time framework for two groups as “2003-2007” and “2009-2013”. In the first time period, China was only a minor player in the export market, but from 2009, China becomes one of the biggest importers of Zambian Copper.

The last two weeks of our research, we had two more case studies, namely Ethiopia and Chile. Chile has the same product for export as Zambia: copper ores; Ethiopia was geographically close to Chile and was also very tight in its relationship with the Chinese government. However, Professor Su and I argued that Chile was different from Zambia that Chile’s institutional set-up was much more democratic than Zambia; Ethiopia, alternatively, exports a very different product to Zambia. As Zambia focuses it export industry in products such as Copper, Ethiopia specialized in oily seeds and other agricultural goods.

What we find throughout the data in two time periods was that Zambia, as well as Ethiopia, experienced a fall in the manufacturing sector’s share of GDP, indicating an increasing level of de-industrialization within these economies. However, Chile, with a more robust political institution, was more resilient to the possible consequences of resource curse.

This summer I worked with Professor Peipei Qiu on Environmentalism in Japan, a project jointly carried out with Professor Hiromi Dollase and Ford Scholar Xiaoting Hu in the Chinese and Japanese Department. My work was primarily to compile materials to be used for the third-year Japanese course in the spring of 2019, incorporating the study of environmental issues in Japan into language learning. At the third-year level students still need to learn Japanese grammar by using a textbook, therefore our project is to add a research component to have the students examine Japan’s environmental issues through a digital story telling assignment.

In preparing the teaching materials, we divided the environmental issues into the following areas: air pollution, water pollution, earth erosion and forest preservation, endangered species, nuclear radiation, natural disasters, environmental policy and environmental activism, human-environment interaction, waste management, and energy saving. Students would need to select a topic from one of the areas above and create a story in Japanese based on their research and make a digital presentation.

During the first days we compiled thematic bibliographies of books, articles, videos, and images for each category, so that students can have an informed starting point for research. In order to make sure that our sources are comprehensive with diverse genres, we took two trips to New York City, collecting materials from Japanese bookstores and watching relevant play and artistic exhibitions. We watched Time’s Journey Through a Room, an English adaption of a Japanese play by Toshiki Okada. It is a non-linear narrative of how the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami changed people’s lives. We also visited the Metropolitan to see the exhibition “The Poetry of Nature: Edo Paintings from the Fishbein-Bender Collection.” These activities deepened our understanding of the tradition and current conditions of Japan’s environment.

The project team at the Japanese art exhibition

Towards the end of the project I helped Professor Qiu prepare reading and listening comprehension materials on environmental issues, and also learned how to use Final Cut Pro to create digital stories. These tasks required me to use Japanese language extensively and learn how to use a digital editing tool. As a follow-up activity of the Ford Scholars Project I will use both my language and computer skills to help the students in Japanese 306 to create their digital stories.

One of the highlights of our research activities was an interview of Mrs. Tomiko West, the founding member of Vassar’s Japanese program and an atomic bomb survivor. She survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing at the tender age of thirteen. It was poignant to hear her personal experience of the nuclear bombing, radiation, and black rain. The horrifying images of nuclear catastrophe and radioactive diseases took concrete shape in the abrupt deaths of her parents and grandparents. With a video camera we recorded her testimony on the catastrophic impact of nuclear weapon and her statement calling for world peace and environment protection. These recordings will be preserved in Vassar’s Chinese and Japanese Department as powerful educational materials for generations to come. The interview with Mrs. West was an unforgettable moment when the traumatic events that seem so far away actually intersect with our lives in the Vassar community.

Mrs. West telling us her experience during the Hiroshima atomic bombing.

The ultimate goal of this Ford project is to help students in Japanese classes realize how environmental issues are both local and global, thereby cultivate a sense of personal responsibility.

This summer I worked with Professor Benjamin Ho from the Economics department studying NGO partisanship. This is a rather funny question to tackle as Non-Governmental Organizations are legally required to be non-partisan. They cannot support or oppose  political parties, candidates, and the like or they face the risk of losing tax-exempt status. However, NGOs can take positions on political issues. Because of this, when looking through a list of popular NGOs, one usually has some intuition on whether it is right or left leaning, despite the non-partisan status. A good is example is the organization Planned Parenthood, which has associated itself with liberal values.

While it is not surprising that NGOs have partisan bias, there is a lack of research that specifies how much, or to what degree. We wanted to give every organization some sort of score, which would then allow each to fall somewhere on a partisan scale. We decided to utilize CharityNavigator, a website that evaluates charities’ performance by analyzing their financial records, accountability, and transparency. This provided our list of organizations to study. There are a few categories that CharityNavigator collects for each organization including but not limited to: program expenses, tax information, mission statements, etc. With a wealth of information on each charity, we then had to figure out what was relevant to us on our quest to tease out partisanship. So began my first task: researching the different methods people have used to determine partisanship.

Naturally, the are several ways to do this, but the method that became apparent to use was some form of text analysis. This was surprising to me at first, and slightly daunting. If my task was to create some sort of numerical score, the last thing I wanted to work with was words. Luckily it’s been done before. At this point it’s common knowledge that Fox news is more conservative than the New York Times, but the research that proves this was done by researchers Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro. Here is their basic idea: liberals and conservatives use different vocabulary, therefore language choice is an indicator of partisanship. They created a liberal and conservative corpus (basically a compilation of words) by collecting congressional records (a daily document that contains all the speeches made in congress) and sorting each speech based on whether the speaker was a Democrat of Republican. Then, they compared the language from various media outlets to each corpus and developed similarity scores.

I set out to do the same thing, which meant I had to first learn some technical skills. As I mentioned before, CharityNavigator conveniently has each organization’s mission statement (we would use these to compare to the liberal and conservative congressional documents), but there are over 8,000 charities. Collecting these mission statements by hand would be impossible. Likewise, the daily congressional record PDF document is usually over 200 pages. I had to learn how to webscrape, which is an automated process of collecting data off of web pages, and to do this, I had to learn the coding language Python.

Luckily, I have coding experience, so learning these skills wasn’t too difficult and actually ended up being one of the most satisfying parts of this project. The idea of having to somehow collect 8,000+ mission statements was panic-inducing, but once I had worked out the code, pressed the ‘run’ button, and watched as all the information I wanted showed up in my excel document, I finally had confidence that I could successfully complete this project.

We decided to use Bayes’ Theorem as our text analysis method, which again was inspired by work done by Gentzkow and Shapiro.

We use this equation to answer this question: Given a certain word or phrase, what is the probability that the speaker is Republican?

We did this for all relevant words and phrases in each mission statement. Let’s take a look at the ACLU Foundation of Maryland’s mission statement: “The Maryland ACLU works to ensure that all people in the state of Maryland are free to think and speak as they choose and can lead their lives free from discrimination and unwarranted government intrusion. We are guided in our work by the United States Bill of Rights and the Maryland Declaration of Rights. The Maryland ACLU acts without partisanship to achieve these goals. We work in the state and federal courts, the Maryland General Assembly and local governments, and in communities across the state to realize this goal.”

It explicitly states that it is a nonpartisan organization, but it’s compilation of words and phrases have a .18 score, which indicates that democrats are more likely to use the language that this organization used. In turn, we see this as an indicator that this organization is more likely to be liberal-leaning. We attempt to verify this by checking the voting data from the county the organization is located in, the assumption being that liberal-leaning charities are more likely to congregate in liberal-leaning counties. While this is not accurate for every single charity, it helps us gauge the accuracy of our Bayes’ theorem method.

Overall, our findings have mostly lined up with our natural intuitions, which is a good sign. The nature of this project doesn’t quite lend itself to discovering groundbreaking results – if our measure said Planned Parenthood was actually conservative, it would cause me to take a second look at my code rather than get excited about publishing my surprising findings. This has been the first time that I’ve looked for comforting results, rather than exciting ones.

Our next stage is a survey that will examine the link between people’s partisanship and their relationship and perception of these very same organizations that we’ve already scored. Whether the results are comforting or exciting, I’m greatly looking forward to continuing with this project and am incredibly grateful for the experience I’ve had this summer.

This summer, I worked with Professor Zachariah Mampilly from the Political Science Department studying taxation by armed groups in conflict zones. The work undertaken this summer is part of a continuing project by Professor Mampilly that seeks to better understand and explain the underlying logic of taxation by rebel groups in areas under their control.

We started by compiling and reviewing existing literature on taxation and its relationship to rebel governance. Much of this work relies on a paradigm of economic instrumentalism to explain why and how armed groups engage in taxation. This body of work paints a broad picture that tends to obscure or ignore the varieties of practices that characterize taxation by different active and historical rebel groups globally. In order to better account for the diversity of practices and goals of different rebel groups, we identified a number of active groups in different parts of the world to focus on and researched their tax practices to evaluate existing and proposed hypotheses about the economic and non-economic motivations for rebel taxation.

 (NSCN-IM Camp Hebron, Nagaland, India)

One group we focused on was the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Isak-Muivah (NSCN-IM), a nationalist insurgent group based in northeastern India that is known for its heavy taxation of the region under its control. In July, Professor Mampilly traveled to India to conduct fieldwork in Nagaland, while I remained at Vassar to analyze data collected from the trip. His interviews in India yielded data from civil society groups in Nagaland about current and historical NSCN-IM tax collection practices that allowed us critically evaluate purely economic explanations for rebel tax structures in existing literature, specifically their reliance on the idea of time horizons determining tax behaviors as proposed by Mancur Olson. The primary source tax data about the NSCN-IM seems to point instead toward other motivations behind taxation, which will require additional data collection and analysis to fully explore.

Overall, working with Professor Mampilly in early stage research for a long-term project was a rewarding and illuminating experience.

This summer I had the pleasure of working with Assistant Political Science Professor Taneisha Means on a project entitled Black in the American Courthouse: Black Judges and Representation in the 21st Century. This on-going project seeks to examine the significance of diversity on the bench—specifically as it applies to black state-level justices.

I needed to dive straight into a number of rich texts which provided a sense of framing for the rest of the summer. During my first week, I worked to familiarize myself with the ideas and definitions introduced by: Black Faces in the Mirror by Katherine Tate, Black Mosaic; The Politics of Black Pan-Ethnic Diversity by Candis Watts-Smith, and Sisters in the Statehouse by Nadia E. Brown. These texts had influenced and informed Means’ initial work on this project, and they inspired me to dig up every syllabus I’ve encountered during my time at Vassar, because I knew I had been introduced to ideas that could further enrich the project as we moved forward. Means made it clear in the beginning that this research process would be a collaborative one, and from the very first days of research she welcomed fresh ideas as well as my voluntary act of checking out nearly 15 books she did not assign.

By the second week we had already begun recreating a new survey instrument and interview questionnaire, and from there several tasks began and were works-in-progress throughout the last six weeks of the program. While the survey and interview questionnaire were still being drafted between the two of us, I began the creation of a database of black judges across the nation. Means had already ran into the issue of locating judges for interview and surveying purposes in the past, so the continual cataloging of judges’ contact information became a big goal for the project. Around this same time I was also tasked with transcribing and analyzing nearly 30 interviews that Means had already conducted.

Photo Courtesy of Karl Rabe

The mentorship and research opportunity that Professor Means provided for me during this summer completely exceeded all of my expectations for this program. Not only did this project gave me several ideas for a thesis in political science, but it fully rekindled my desire to pursue academia as a career. I am beyond thrilled to be able to continue with this project as Professor Means’ research assistant this fall.

This summer, I worked with Professor Gisella Kagy in the Economics department to understand the impact of harmful early life health conditions, including in utero effects, and their persistence over generations. Little is known about these effects over time, but studying this transmission within families is important in understanding the overall development process, our relationship with our environment, and how what is available to us also has an impact on our lives.

The project focused on literature review of what is currently known in regards to the multigenerational impact on mothers and infants (looking at malnutrition, disease, stress, etc.) to further provide insight on the welfare impacts that is still widely prevalent in less developed countries

Over my weeks, I was able to read through many studies that focused on various inequalities/obstacles that families faced and their overall influence. For example, to look at malnutrition, many of the natural experiments focused on the impact of a famine to a generation and its lasting impact. These studies identified low birth weights and showed associations to later life outcomes with negative relationships to socioeconomic status, mental health, and educational attainment as examples.

A number of studies also looked at the impact of discrimination and stress to pregnant mothers and what that meant in regards to the next (and future) generations. For example, birth outcomes of Arabic-named women were tracked post-9/11 – the impact was shown to be significant and harmful, as measured by preterm birth and low birth weights, which has its own associations in later life outcomes.

It was interesting to see patterns come about. Many studies focused on natural experiments to discuss these intergenerational trends. While it becomes difficult to reach definitive conclusions, statistically significant and rational associations become useful in raising questions about what can be done, how certain demographics can be helped, and whether new policies can be implemented for a larger purpose.

With this project serving as background information on the intergenerational effects of the 1974-1975 Bangladesh Famine, it was important to develop my own questions about the readings to further guide me through my weeks.

This summer I worked alongside Professor Ellman to create a website that would allow POC students at Vassar to post about their experiences as they attend an elite institution that has historically marginalized their voices & perspectives.

After the events of last school year, with the election of Trump, and the series of bias incidents that occurred on campus, Vassar saw students come together and present a united front against ignorance, hatred & bigotry. There was also quite a bit of talk about transparency and the need for institutional memory. We felt the construction of a digital space meant to reflect the experiences of POC students could act as a institutional memory for these students. A digital space that would exist beyond the 4 year lifespan of an undergrad student, giving incoming students a concrete resource to rely on & to inform them on how to navigate Vassar.

So we spent the summer researching, interviewing & recording. We spent a lot of time compiling resources that would be available on the website in order to help to educate those who utilize the site. These were mostly books, and academic journals that shed light on the issues at hand, giving people a sort of syllabus to follow.

In conjunction with this, we conducted a couple of interviews with students. The purpose of these interviews were to post a series of experiences from the perspective of students, as they navigate Vassar. The questions focused around the microaggressions they’ve experienced on campus, how they’ve dealt with this issues and the resources and support systems they have sought out/created in order to take care of themselves.