--- title: "About this book" subtitle: "How the curriculum was built, the editorial standard, and how it fits into ASSIP 2026." pagetitle: "About — Empirical Finance from the Ground Up (ASSIP 2026)" description-meta: > How the ASSIP 2026 Empirical Finance textbook was drafted, the editorial honesty policy, and how to contribute. Hosted by Prof. Lei Gao for the GMU ASSIP 2026 cohort. toc: true number-sections: false --- ## What this is This site is the textbook, lab manual, instructor manual, and capstone gallery for the **Empirical Finance research group of ASSIP 2026 — the Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program** at George Mason University's College of Science. It runs as **eight full-time weeks** (Mon–Fri 9 am – 5 pm) from **Mon Jun 22, 2026** through the **ASSIP Research Symposium on Wed Aug 12, 2026**, with orientation on Thu Jun 18 and the holidays Jun 19 (Juneteenth) and Jul 3 (Independence Day observance) off. The curriculum is built around real datasets (CRSP, Compustat, HMDA, EDGAR, FRED, USPTO, and more — see the [data dictionary](book/appendices/C-data-dictionary/README.md)) and real methods (OLS and its standard-error pathologies, IV, DiD, RD, synthetic control, shift-share, event studies, text-as-data, and an AI copilot lab). ## Who runs it - **Faculty mentor:** **[Prof. Lei Gao](https://business.gmu.edu/)**, Associate Professor of Finance at George Mason University's Costello College of Business. **Prof. Gao's 2026 ASSIP slot is officially REMOTE only.** - **ASSIP director:** **Dr. Amanda Haymond Still**, GMU College of Science. Program contact: `cosassip@gmu.edu`. - **Cohort:** 14 advanced high-school students (15+) and pre-graduation undergraduates, selected by GMU's College of Science. Typical ASSIP group size is 2–15, so 14 is the high end and is run with a **layered mentorship model**: faculty mentor over the whole cohort, with PhD / RA sub-leaders working sub-pods on data engineering, identification, and writing. ## The ASSIP context ASSIP (Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program) is GMU's flagship summer research internship for advanced high-school students (age 15+; 16+ for in-person wet-lab tracks — not applicable to our remote slot) and undergraduates who have not yet graduated. There is **no minimum GPA**. Students may participate in at most two summer sessions. The program costs a **$25 application fee plus $1,299 tuition**, and **full tuition waivers are available** for Pell-eligible and reduced-lunch students. Completion yields: - A **research poster at the ASSIP Research Symposium** (Wed Aug 12, 2026) — the required core deliverable, with in-person poster sessions for on-site interns and virtual breakouts for remote interns (our cohort works virtually). - A **research abstract** published in the *Journal of Student-Scientists' Research* (JSSR, GMU Mason Publishing). - An optional **full paper** for projects that support it. - **3 GMU College of Science credits.** - Participation in the ASSIP **scientific-writing and career forum**. ## How it was drafted The textbook was drafted in a **multi-agent workflow** under human editorial supervision. The pipeline runs roughly: 1. A **planner** drafts a chapter outline from the syllabus and prior reviews, with handoff notes for the writer. 2. A **writer** produces the chapter, the worked examples, the problem set, and the companion notebook. 3. A **reviewer** reads the chapter against the planner's outline and the editorial standard, flags issues, and writes a revision memo. 4. A **human editor** (Prof. Gao) accepts, rejects, or rewrites — and resolves any disagreement between the planner and the reviewer. Every artifact you see — chapters, problem sets, solution sketches, notebooks, data cards, capstone specs — went through this pipeline. The handoff notes are kept under [`agents/handoffs/`](https://github.com/edwardlg/assip-2026-empirical-finance/tree/main/agents/handoffs) so the editorial process itself is auditable. ## The `[CHECK]` policy Empirical finance is full of numbers that are *almost right* — a coefficient quoted from memory, a year off by one, a sample period that does not quite match the source. The honest way to handle that is to flag the uncertainty in line, not to launder it into confidence. Throughout the book you will see tags like: > The HML factor earned an annualized premium of roughly 4.3 % > in 1963–1990 `[CHECK against Fama-French 1993 Table 4]`. A `[CHECK]` is **not** a typo or a TODO. It is an explicit statement that the surrounding number, claim, or attribution has not yet been independently verified against a primary source. Tagged claims are true to the best of the writer's knowledge but the verification step has not been logged. Students are encouraged to do that verification themselves and submit corrections. ## A note on synthetic results The five **capstone projects** ship with illustrative result tables and figures. Where a capstone shows an estimate — a coefficient, a t-statistic, a balance table — that estimate is a **synthetic illustration** generated from realistic but simulated data, *not* a publication-quality replication. Each capstone landing page carries a prominent banner saying so. Students executing the capstone for real will obtain different (and we hope, more interesting) results. ## A note on math Math is rendered with **KaTeX** for speed and clean typography. Display equations use the standard double-dollar block: $$ \widehat{\boldsymbol{\beta}} = (\mathbf{X}'\mathbf{X})^{-1}\mathbf{X}'\mathbf{y}, \qquad \widehat{\mathrm{Var}}(\widehat{\boldsymbol{\beta}}) = (\mathbf{X}'\mathbf{X})^{-1}\mathbf{X}' \widehat{\boldsymbol{\Omega}} \mathbf{X} (\mathbf{X}'\mathbf{X})^{-1}. $$ Inline math like $\Pr(A \mid B) = \Pr(A,B) / \Pr(B)$ uses single dollars. If a formula does not render, it is a bug — please [open an issue](https://github.com/edwardlg/assip-2026-empirical-finance/issues/new). ## How to contribute There are three good ways to help. ### Submit a correction If you find a `[CHECK]` you can resolve, or a flat error you can fix, the recommended path is: 1. Fork the repo on GitHub. 2. Edit the relevant `.md` file. 3. Open a pull request with the source of the corrected fact in the description. ### Suggest a problem Problem sets are the most valuable contribution. A good problem - has a unique correct answer (or a unique correct approach), - uses only data students can actually obtain, - ties to a specific chapter and learning objective, and - comes with a short solution sketch in the same style as the existing ones. ### Suggest a reading Week 5 and Week 6 are reader's-guide weeks. If there is a paper that *belongs* in the empirical-finance core for advanced high-school and pre-graduation undergraduate researchers and is not here, [open an issue](https://github.com/edwardlg/assip-2026-empirical-finance/issues/new) with the citation and a one-paragraph case. ## License and citation The text and notebooks are released under [**CC BY-NC-SA 4.0**](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Code blocks inside the notebooks are additionally released under MIT. Suggested citation: > Gao, L. (2026). *Empirical Finance from the Ground Up — ASSIP 2026 > Cohort.* Costello College of Business, George Mason University. > ## Contact - Editorial questions, errata, and partnership inquiries: **lgao9 (at) gmu.edu** (Prof. Lei Gao). - ASSIP program logistics, applications, and admissions: **cosassip (at) gmu.edu** (Dr. Amanda Haymond Still, ASSIP Director).