Social Sciences/Humanities Summer Research | Department of Economics

Students are invited to apply to the Social Sciences/Humanities Summer Research Program, designed to expand research opportunities for students in the Social Sciences and Humanities fields for summer 2026. Students can apply to each opportunity by including a resume and cover letter addressed to the faculty member listed in the job description. The application deadline is Sunday, April 12.  

Humanities/Social Sciences Summer Research Program | Department of Economics

Faculty Member: Professor Minuk Kim

Job Description 

Our project will be looking at how foreign retaliatory tariffs and consumer boycotts against U.S. exports affect purchasing behavior in American communities that are heavily reliant on these targeted industries. The Canadian boycott of U.S. whiskey is a good example, where Jim Beam paused production at its main Kentucky distillery, and U.S. exports to Canada dropped about 85%. Using Nielsen retail scanner and consumer panel data, we will test whether households in these hard-hit counties see declines in consumption or purchase lower-quality cheaper goods, and whether local retail market concentration matters for how this plays out (e.g., large chains like Walmart often use national pricing strategies, so the effects on households may differ depending on whether the households shop at Walmart or a local grocer).

Week-to-week, the student will be collecting, constructing, and cleaning datasets in R, building concordances between tariff schedules and product codes, and running regression analysis. The data construction will likely be very time-consuming, but the aim is to get a dataset that is ready for analysis by week 6 and then spend the rest analyzing the data. 

The student will gain experience working with large datasets (Nielsen data for example is millions of rows and often need to be accessed by code rather than MS Excel on most computers), finding data from government sources, and also running causal analysis using econometric techniques. 

The student will also learn how to effectively delegate routine tasks like data cleaning and harmonization to AI tools (e.g. Claude Code) and focus their time on the more substantive parts of research, like developing intuition, thinking through theory, and interpreting results

Skills or Training 

Experience with a programming or statistical software language is required (R preferred, but Stata, Python, etc. also work). The student should be comfortable with regression analysis, ideally from an econometrics or statistics course.

Class Years Eligible: Current students in the Classes of 2027, 2028, and 2029.

Majors: Economics majors/minors preferred, but any major welcome if they have coursework in econometrics or statistics and experience with a statistical programming language.

Length: This position is full-time (minimum of 240 hours, over 8 weeks). The estimated start date is June 1, 2026. The estimated end date is July 24, 2026.

Internship Format: Remote 

Funding Award: This opportunity includes a funding award of $5,000 (minus 15-20% taxes). 

Questions about this opportunity? Please contact Katie Krimmel at kkrimmel@brynmawr.edu and Professor Minuk Kim at mkim2@brynmawr.edu