Projects

Project Description

In this project, we are: 1) fetching biographies of board members from Securities and Exchange Commission filings, 2) parsing those biographies for relevant information and ties to other organizations, 3) matching that information to other data sources, and 4) seeing how those affiliations affect the organization's decisions. Across a couple different projects, we have gathered and looked at the bios of more than 10,000 directors already! This is an ongoing project that CEW&T mentees have contributed to in the past. For the upcoming semester, there is a particular focus on firms that have done an Initial Public Offering or Special Purpose Acquisition Companies. In terms of the individual characteristics, I am currently most focused on educational affiliations, gender, and whether the director is connected to religious organizations. I enjoy mentoring through this program and have had past students go on to enter PhD and other graduate programs. I have had several projects with CEW&T students accepted to conferences and also published one article with an undergraduate honors student.

Technology or Computational Component

There are several technological components to this project, which will be more or less depending on the mentee's knowledge and interests: 1) Many of the steps we use rely on Python to extract and parse the director's biography. 2) Much of our data is first viewed and cleaned in Microsoft Excel. 3) All of the data manipulation and analysis is in the statistics program STATA. 4) The student can use any other visualization tool such as Tableau or BI to prepare other graphs and tables. You will have the opportunity to start from scripts and files often written by other students, so will usually be building from something as opposed to needing to start from scratch, but you may need to watch some video tutorials to get up to speed on some programs that are less familiar to you.