Projects — Capstone Tracker¶

Placeholders only — students fill in their actual details after Week 1's idea-generation workshop

The 14 cards below are placeholders. Each student claims a card by the end of Week 1, after the Monday idea-generation workshop and the Wednesday "What is a finding?" mentor session. Project topic, pod assignment, and pre-analysis plan (PAP) status are filled in collaboratively with the assigned RA sub-leader. Repos are created from the assip-2026-template (link TBD) and linked here once they exist.

How this page works¶

Project topic / track — one of the five tracks listed at the bottom of this page, or a student-proposed topic that the mentor signs off on.
Pod / RA sub-leader — the cohort is grouped into four pods of 3–4 students; each pod is led by a PhD/RA sub-leader.
PAP status — Pending (not yet drafted), Drafted (under review), or Filed (committed to the repo's pap/ directory and tagged with the pap-v1 git tag). See the PAP template and Chapter 7.3 of the textbook for the standard.
GitHub repo — every project lives in a public GitHub repo under the gmu-assip-2026 org (link TBD).
Last update — the date of the project's most recent meaningful commit or mentor-session note.

The tracker is intentionally lightweight; the substantive artifacts (PAP, code, posters, drafts) live in each project's repo.

The 14 projects¶

Project 01

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod A / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 02

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod A / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 03

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod A / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 04

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod A / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 05

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod B / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 06

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod B / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 07

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod B / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 08

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod B / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 09

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod C / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 10

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod C / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 11

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod C / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 12

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod D / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 13

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod D / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]
Project 14

Student: [Name TBD] Track: [Topic / track TBD] Pod: [Pod D / RA sub-leader TBD] PAP: Pending Repo: [TBD] Last update: [TBD]

Project tracks¶

The five tracks below mirror the five capstone gallery entries in the textbook (Appendix B). Each track has at least one anchor paper in the reading list, a primary dataset that we already know how to access, and an empirical specification that can be executed in one summer by a motivated high-school student with AP Statistics. Students may also propose an off-track topic; mentor signs off in Week 1.

Track 1 — Fair Lending and Discrimination

Replicate and extend the algorithmic-fairness literature on mortgage lending, using HMDA + Census data to test whether observably similar applicants are treated differently across protected classes. Anchored to Prof. Gao's published work on fair lending and on the SEC/CFPB regulatory record.

Track 2 — Common Ownership and Competition

Measure the rise of overlapping institutional ownership (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) across competing firms, and test whether common-ownership intensity correlates with prices, markups, or innovation. Uses 13F filings and product-market peer data.

Track 3 — Innovation and Patents

Use the USPTO PatentsView bulk data + KPSS patent-value series to ask whether some kind of policy, capital structure, or governance shock changes the rate or the value of corporate innovation. Strong fit for students drawn to industrial-organization or technology questions.

Track 4 — FinTech, Payments, and Market Microstructure

Use high-frequency TAQ data, crypto order-book snapshots, or payments-app adoption data to study how a new financial technology changes price discovery, liquidity, or financial inclusion. Strong fit for computationally inclined students.

Track 5 — Macro Events and Market Reactions

Event-study the reaction of asset prices, credit spreads, or implied volatility to a class of macro shocks — FOMC announcements, CPI prints, geopolitical events, or natural disasters. Strong fit for students who enjoy time-series mechanics and rapid-fire empirical workflows.

What "done" looks like¶

A finished project — by Friday August 7, 2026, the week before symposium — has all of the following in its GitHub repo:

A filed PAP (pap/pap-v1.md, tagged pap-v1), written before the main analysis was run.
A reproducible Makefile or run_all.sh that rebuilds every figure and table from raw data to final PDF.
A results/ directory with the headline table, the headline figure, and at least three robustness checks.
A poster/ directory with the 48"×36" landscape poster PDF (see the poster template).
A JSSR-formatted abstract (150 – 250 words) in paper/abstract.md.
A short README.md that explains what the project does, what data it uses, and how to reproduce it.

The dress rehearsal is Monday August 10, 2026. The symposium is Wednesday August 12, 2026.