Empirics Lab

This is a student-led initiative. The School’s official site can be found at http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk.

What is the empirics lab?

We are a group of PhD students at Cambridge Judge Business School with a common goal:

To reduce the gap between empirical training in the School’s graduate courses and the application of empirical methods in dissertations and research projects. During term-time we organise fortnightly, one-to-one empirics lab sessions, to discuss the empirical aspects of your research projects (e.g., MPhil / PhD dissertation, MFin research / consulting project) at any stage of your research.

What our clients say

“The Empirics Lab offers a fantastic service to students who need a little help with their statistics (and who doesn’t!). The meeting with Thilo Klein helped me to think clearly and logically about what I needed to do with my data and offered an excellent supplementary set of advice to supervisors who are not always available. You need to book in advance sometimes, so plan ahead!” – Joe Gladstone, MPhil in Innovation, Strategy, and Organisation, University of Cambridge, Cambridge/UK

How can the lab help me?

Well, first of all, we can not do your (home)work for you. However, we can help you to find appropriate empirical methods to address your research questions. We can point you to resources (software packages, websites, papers) and can probably get you in touch with people working on similar problems here in Cambridge or elsewhere.

How can I arrange an appointment?

To arrange an appointment, please follow the three simple steps below.

1. Find a consultant

Have a look at our profiles to make sure that your (proposed) research and your consultant are a good fit.

		Despo Malikkidou [email protected]		Topics: tail risk in emerging and developed countries, power laws in economics and finance, financial econometrics, econometrics of high frequency data; Methods: time series analysis, tail index estimation methods, regression analysis.
		Jerry He [email protected]		Topics: R&D alliance choices, contingent contracts (royalties, milestone payments); Methods: instrumental variables, sequential bargaining models, propensity score matching, gibbs sampling methods.
		Michael Freeman [email protected]		Topics: inventory management, retail analytics, forecasting, e-commerce, customer intelligence; Methods: statistical inference, computer simulation, stochastic methods, time series analysis.
		Thilo Klein [email protected]		Topics: development finance and insurance, health economics, matching markets; Methods: experiments, discrete choice models, sample selection models, instrumental variable techniques, panel models, social network analyis.
		Blaine Landis [email protected]		Topics: personality and social psychology, social networks, psychometrics; Methods: regression analysis, factor analysis, structural equation modeling, meta-analysis, social network analysis, dyadic data analysis (Dave Kenny's Social Relations Model).

2. Register

Register your half-hour session by sending us an email. In particular, please send us a one page pdf (not a microsoft .doc or .docx format) including

your research question,
a description of the data and key variables you have collected or intend to collect, and
how you intend to address the question using empirical methods.

It is easier for us to identify problems if you bring sample data sets and/or syntax files. You may either bring your own laptop or send the files by email – please consider redaction of sensitive data from working data sets to ensure the privacy of your subjects.

3. Observe our cancellation policy

If you cannot make it to your booked appointment, please unregister asap using the ‘Cancel Booking’ link in your confirmation email. IMPORTANT: If we experience that appointments are not kept, we will have to revert to “walk-in consulting” involving considerable waiting times. If you experience problems with the registration process, please send an email to [email protected].

How can I help the lab?

If you haven’t seen us yet, tell us about your research problem – we are excited to hear about your research at any stage. For those who have already visited us, please

help us improve the consulting process by completing the feedback form,
acknowledge our contribution (if there is any) in your work,
spread the word.

How can I get involved?

become a consultant: If you are a PhD student or a faculty member working with or developing empirical methods, we’d like to hear from you!
(help us) share empirical resources: We greatly appreciate if you share links to online resources or help us improve our learning material.
initiate student-industry collaborations: If you want your data analysed by a graduate student as part of a dissertation or consulting project, please send us a short proposal, comprising (a) an outline of the questions to be answered, (b) a sample dataset or a description of the data, and (c) a tentative timeframe for the project. We will make sure that your proposal is shared with a pool of suitable candidates. Here is a collection of the school’s Student Consultancy Projects.

To get involved, please send an email to [email protected].