Diversity
MIT Sloan Predoctoral Opportunities
At MIT Sloan, helping students discover their futures and shape their life stories is an important part of our mission: to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice. Here, we offer guidance and pathways to advanced degree and doctoral programs. Our faculty partner with all kinds of learners, from high school students to undergraduates though predoctoral students, helping them discover unimagined research careers and opportunities.
Pathways to Research and Doctoral Careers (PREDOC)
Predoctoral research programs provide valuable early-career exposure to research techniques and offer participants a preview of what to expect in an academic career. The Pathways to Research and Doctoral Careers (PREDOC) consortium aims to foster a talented, diverse, and inclusive population in the quantitative social sciences, with a long-term goal of increasing diversity among faculty in business schools and economics departments.
Learn more about PREDOC
Please direct questions related to MIT Sloan Predoctoral opportunities to Ray Reagans.
Current Research Opportunities
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Professors Christopher Palmer, Lawrence Schmidt, Taha Choukhmane, Dan Greenwald, & Emil Verner
The project is a worldwide study of the relationship between credit expansions, macroeconomic fluctuations, and financial crises. The study is based on the construction of a large and novel database on the sectoral distribution of private credit for 116 countries starting in 1940. The project is motivated by the observation that many credit booms end in financial crises, but others are linked to more benign macroeconomic outcomes. Theory predicts that the sectoral allocation of credit --- what credit is used for --- matters for distinguishing between these “bad” and "good" credit booms. These novel data allow us to more closely examine the nature of credit booms and how the characteristics of credit booms shape their aftermath. These results will inform macro-finance models of credit cycles and financial crises, as well as the policy response to these booms. This is a large ongoing research project and has recently been awarded with the European Systemic Risk Board's Ieke van den Burgh Prize.
Skills required: Proficiency in Stata and Python are required
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Erin Kelly
My work investigates the implications of workplace policies and management practices for firms, workers, and families. I am interested in specific organizational changes and work conditions and how they affect organizational performance, workers' wellbeing, and equity. I am currently engaged in collaborative research on participatory work practices in warehouses and the impact of family leaves and flexibility initiatives on careers, as part of understanding and potentially reducing gender inequality. I am committed to making my analyses and theorizing more explicitly intersectional than it has been in the past, and those projects begin to do that. I am also interested in new research on remote and hybrid work, comparative research on organizations and racial and gender inequality, and better linking work conditions to both wellbeing and specific performance outcomes.
Skills required: R (preferred) or Stata, Qualtrics, excellent written and verbal communications skills, and project management skills because this person would likely be a primary point of contact for the management and employees in the partner company.
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Rahul Bhui & Abdullah Almaatouq
Our goal is to understand the causes and consequences of rational and irrational judgment. To do this, we take a highly interdisciplinary approach that combines cognitive science and behavioral economics, and investigate a wide range of decisions using a blend of computational cognitive modeling and behavioral experiments.
Skills required: Coding experience in JavaScript, data analysis experience with R or Matlab