Senior theses put UChicago students' economics training to work on messy reality

Immigration. The media and elections. Commodity prices and war.

These subjects are front-page news almost daily. They’re also among the widely varied topics that were investigated this past year by students in the Undergraduate Economics Workshop in the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.

During the year-long capstone course, fourth-year students in the undergraduate honors economics program conduct in-depth research on a topic of their choosing and write a thesis paper about it, guided by faculty and input from their fellow students in the workshop.

“It’s their first foray into research, into creation of knowledge,” said Victor Lima, PhD‘00, AM’96, co-director of undergraduate studies and masters programs in economics. “The honors variant of the standard economics track equips students with the tools and topical knowledge necessary to arrive at the honors workshop ready to pursue research into a topic of their choice.”

The range of these inquiries is wide. The 26 theses from this year’s workshop spanned public transit in national parks, the 2016 Olympics and Rio de Janeiro’s labor market, online collectibles auctions and vacation rentals in Hawaii.

“The breadth is incredible,” Lima said. “Here, there’s a philosophy that economics is a set of tools and that set of tools is applicable to anything people do. This department has a history of taking these tools and applying them to questions of broad interest to social scientists.”

That range extends to the faculty advisor that each student seeks to coach them in the research process. The advisor can be an economist in any of the University’s colleges and schools, such as the business, law and medical schools, and the crime and poverty labs.

For some students, their thesis paper will become part of their application for Ph.D. programs. Lima said that in recent years, multiple honors economics graduates have been admitted to each of the top five doctoral programs in economics in the country, with one cohort making up a third of an entering class at Harvard. What’s more, “students report back that they feel well prepared and ready to engage when they arrive at their PhD programs.”

Other students go on to work in consulting or tech. 

“A lot of the really good private sector jobs that students take place a premium on problem-solving and the ability to analyze questions,” Lima said. “These are all skills that the research process will help hone and develop.

“The first step in all these journeys is taking the honors workshop, where they learn how to take this ideal world we put on blackboards and put that ideal work into the messy, complicated, roundabout real world we encounter.”

Staying on Track to Study Emigration and Birth Rates

Ben Miele, AB’26, credits his advisor Yana Gallen, AB’09, with literally keeping his research on the right track—or rather, tracks. For his thesis, Miele investigated the effect emigration from Mexico to the United States had on Mexico’s birth rate, drawing on Mexican government migration and birth rate data. 

In addition, his calculations incorporated municipalities’ nearness to sections of railroad track whose top allowable speeds were slow enough that migrants could jump on board trains there and ride them into the U.S.

Using the rail data eliminated potential factors on birth rate other than migration. 

“You estimate the effect of proximity to those sections of rail on emigration rates, and under certain assumptions, using fancy linear algebra, you can estimate the causal effect of migration on fertility,” Miele explained.

To determine the maximum speeds, he used a formula that combined the angle and grade of tracks, which he sourced from a Mexican regulatory agency’s data base. Gallen suggested looking at the geometry of the rails to identify where the trains would slow down, and the Mexican government’s “incredibly granular” data made it possible.

“I knew I wanted to do something with the train tracks for a long time, but the specifics of what I ended up doing were directly inspired by her,” Miele said of Gallen, an assistant professor in the Harris School of Public Policy and an alumna of the Honors Economics Workshop herself. “It’s an incredible privilege to have someone as smart as she is look at your work and give you feedback about it.”

Miele’s thesis considers the period from 2000-2020, when emigration from the U.S. to Mexico increased dramatically. His analysis found that on average, 0.5 fewer births occur annually in a Mexican municipality for each local household with an emigrant in the U.S.

“The idea is, if someone leaves Chicago and goes to the United Kingdom, there would be one-half fewer births in Chicago,” Miele said. However, in some subsets of his research, he found a positive correlation between emigration and birth rates.

In the second part of his thesis, Miele assesses factors that might explain latter results, using data from the Mexican Migration Project, a collaboration between Brown University and El Colegio de Mexico. He looked at unmarried women’s rates of birth and marriage and births among couples that didn’t emigrate.

He found no effects of emigration on unmarried women, but that emigration corresponded to a decrease in birth rates among married couples. However, Miele also found increased emigration was linked with increased birth rates among financially poorer-than-average couples.

Miele is going to work for a consulting firm in the Bay Area after leaving Hyde Park. He said being in the workshop was “a tremendous amount of fun.” 

Seeing his classmates bring their research ideas to fruition has “been really quite joyful for me, and I’m really proud of all these people that I’ve spent this year working with.”

Considering an airwaves auction’s civic consequences

Fittingly for a project centered around broadcasting, Vera Chaudhry, AB’26, got the idea for her thesis from a podcast. After listening to an episode of NPR’s Planet Money that discussed market demand for the broadcast spectrum of the airwaves last fall, she became fascinated with the topic.

That fascination led Chaudhry to explore whether a U.S. government auction of broadcast frequencies in 2016 led to closure of television stations that provided local news programming, and if in turn the stations going dark was followed by a decline in voter participation in their broadcast areas. As she discusses in her thesis, the federal government has regulated the use of broadcast airwaves, which are a public resource, to varying degrees and in varying ways ever since the advent of radio in the early 20th century.

The government has auctioned frequencies on the broadcast spectrum for commercial use since 1994, Chaudhry explains. Responding to increased demand for use in wireless communications, the 2016 auction was noteworthy for allowing owners of some existing stations to sell their station’s bandwidth in addition to the established practice of businesses buying the use of as-yet unallocated airwave frequencies. 

A subset of stations at the far end of the spectrum were even required to sell their wavelengths and either move to another channel or close.

Chaudhry drew on Federal Communications Commission records and data from the auction to determine which stations closed due to selling their frequencies, and which closed stations had provided news programming. She then looked at data from an MIT lab that studies elections and U.S. census data to compare levels of voter participation in areas with those closed stations in 2016, 2018 and 2020.

Chaudhry’s analysis of this data found the stations required to sell their wavelengths were 16.2% more likely to close due to the auction than the stations with the option of selling their share of the broadcast spectrum. She also found that voter turnout in affected areas decreased by 0.83 percentage points in 2020 compared to the 2016 election and by 1.26 percentage points from the 2016 to 2018 elections.

Chaudhry already had an interest in the intersection of markets and public resources prior to beginning her research. It first was piqued by a class on crony capitalism she took as a third-year taught by Luigi Zingales, the Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, in the Booth School of Business.

“It was the first time I started thinking about some of these questions,” she recalled. “I was pretty inspired.” 

She enlisted Zingales as her thesis advisor, and he helped guide her research process, even connecting her with journalists and scholars who had covered and studied the broadcast airwaves and the spectrum auction.

In addition to developing research skills, the Honors Workshop often nurtures strong camaraderie among the students. Chaudhry is among the students who exemplify this aspect of the program—Miele even includes her among a handful of students he cites for contributing to the development of his thesis.

“The economics thesis workshop is very much student-led. Students present their ideas and their papers and their work throughout the year. That was a part of the seminar that I really enjoyed,” Chaudhry said.

Measuring mitigators of conflict, with a Nobelist’s mentoring

Anderson Hu, AB, SB’26, observed that “conflict doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There has to be some sort of shock” that prompts it, and the resulting loss of life and other devastation that war and political violence cause.

Hu’s research examined recent civil conflict in Africa, and how much state capacity could prevent or diminish conflict by offsetting the shocks that cause it. Specifically, Hu considered both state administrative capacity—the ability to provide public goods and services—and coercive capacity, the use of force via police and the military to impose order.

To assess capacity, Hu took data on 24 countries from the Afrobarometer, a research network that measures public opinion on economics and government in dozens of African nations, using survey results from 2014 to 2024. 

To derive conflict incidence and fatalities, he relied on Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a non-profit organization that monitors conflict worldwide. He chose commodity price changes as a representative economic shock that could lead to conflict, which he obtained from an International Monetary Fund dataset.

Hu’s analysis of this data found that greater administrative capacity could lessen conflict by reducing the negative effects of commodity price shocks. However, “in general, coercive capacity doesn’t seem to be that significant, which is a bit surprising,” Hu said.

Hu’s thesis advisor was James A. Robinson, the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science. A recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics, Robinson is among numerous Nobel faculty who have served as an Undergraduate Economics Workshop advisor over the years.  

At the suggestion of one of his TAs, Hu had begun working for Robinson as a research assistant in the fall of 2024, shortly before the Nobel award was announced. 

“It was very cool to wake up to one morning,” Hu said. 

Having an established relationship made it easier to ask Robinson to be his thesis advisor, even if he was a little nervous about his question being “salient and interesting enough to be worth his time.”

But Robinson eagerly suggested research papers for Hu to read and discussed with him how to interpret the results of his data synthesis. 

“What perspective to take when it comes to numbers, the attenuating effect of state capacity is something he helped me develop,” Hu said. “A large part of my thesis was shaped by meeting with him.”

Hu said his experience with Robinson and the workshop overall showed that “the University is very rigorous, it’s very intense, and that results in a very important research output.

“It’s not necessarily for everyone, but I really enjoyed it. There’s a high standard of what research ought to look like, a high standard of the quality of research.”