Staff Associate of Research in Finance
Description
The Columbia Business School is seeking to hire one Research Staff Associate to support research on gender and racial equity in private equity. The primary research project aims to build a comprehensive database covering the employment histories of private equity investment professionals in the United States (“Equity in Private Equity”) under the supervision of Professor Michael Ewens. This database's first goal (Phase 1) is to characterize women's representation by title, firm size, firm type, and location. The second, longer-term goal (Phase 2) is to document the differences in career paths between male and female professionals in the industry. The construction of the database will focus on building it from scratch so that this project is not dependent on commercial data provider licenses. This strategy also allows us to disseminate the data publicly. This data will be the critical input for periodic reports written for the industry’s stakeholders. Ultimately, it will provide critical inputs for the gender and racial representation benchmarking performed by private equity firms.
The work will include quantitative and qualitative research and analysis, collection, coordination, and management of information and data, and development of research materials. The Research Staff Associate will lead in creating and connecting several databases and help manage data entry specialists. This position provides an opportunity to gain experience in academic business research, with a special focus on fields such as finance, economics, and data science; and would be ideal preparation for a Ph.D. program or other graduate study. The position also allows one to interact with industry practitioners who may provide data or expertise. This is a two-year position.
The Research Staff Associate duties involve work related to empirical research in finance and economics.
Specific duties include:
- Collect, clean, and maintain computer datasets and databases. Assist with data entry and ensure data integrity. Extract and link data from multiple databases for analysis. Prepare detailed documentation.
- Develop models and implement program code (STATA, R, Python, SQL, Matlab, etc.). Perform statistical analysis, including regression analysis and machine learning techniques.
- Assist with data analysis and dissemination of findings through the preparation of reports, journal articles, presentations, websites, and other research outlets. Perform case-based research, including work with detailed primary documents.
Applicants for the Staff Associate position are expected to have the following:
- Programming experience in STATA, Python or R is required. Strong preference for those who also know Python and SQL.
- Additional programming experience in Matlab or Julia is preferred.
- Familiarity with statistical tools such as linear regression is required.
- Familiarity with text parsing and analysis (natural language processing) and/or machine learning techniques is preferred.
- Demonstrated exceptional written and oral communications skills needed – a writing sample is required.
- The candidate must be organized and able to work on multiple projects simultaneously.
- At least 6 months of research experience in a research role as a research assistant during the academic year or a summer internship in a research lab or governmental institution such as the NY Fed.
- Bachelor’s degree in Economics or Finance or in a quantitative discipline such as Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, with Economics coursework (including the econometrics sequence)
Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in Economics or Finance or in a quantitative discipline such as Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering with coursework in Economics and Finance.