Thursday, July 29, 2010

VC PhD Scholarships: ACEGES project



Proposal 1- Energy-Economy-Investment Modelling: Volatility of oil prices and oil supply
Applications are invited in the area of Energy-Economy-Investment Modelling. The applications should be within the scope of the ACEGES project (http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/lmbs/research/cibs/cibs-scenario-planning/cibs-scenario-planning_home.cfm).

In particular, we encourage applications that aim to investigate the relationships between:
i) Spot price of crude oil,
ii) Expectations of future oil prices
iii) Price of crude oil futures
iv) Oil futures spread (defined as the percent deviation of the oil futures price from the spot price of oil)
v) Oil supply shocks.

The overall research aim is to investigate what determines the spot and futures price of crude oil and the importance of the evolution of the price of oil in explaining oil production of OPEC and non-OPEC countries.

Applicants are expected to have a Master’s degree with a strong quantitative, mathematical or statistical focus. Programming experience in Java and/or R is desirable but not essential.

References:
1) Hamilton, J. (2003), What is an Oil Shock? Journal of Econometrics, vol. 113(2), 363-398
2) Alquist, R and Kilian, L. (2010), What Do We Learn from the Price of Crude Oil Futures? Journal of Applied Econometrics, 25(4), 539-573.
3) Kaufmann, R.K. (1991), Oil production in the lower 48 states: Reconciling curve fitting and econometric models. Resources and Energy, 13(1), 111-127

In the first instance, contact me at v.voudouris@londonmet.ac.uk

Proposal 2 - Consumer decision-making and social interaction at the movies: The Philadelphia Story
When faced with choices between new products and services, the properties of which are uncertain, how do individuals behave? Economists commonly distinguish between social and private information available to the consumer - social learning takes place through social networks, while private learning is the consequence of past experience. In factoring both into the decision-making process it is possible to model consumer behaviour - in this instance film consumer behaviour.

To do this I propose developing an agent-based model, which allows the researcher to investigate the microscopic behaviour of individual film consumers who watched particular films at particular cinemas at particular moments in time in order to a) grow the macroscopic environment manifest in the long tail distribution of revenue, b) chart the pattern of diffusion from box-office rich to box-office poor cinemas, and c) forecast the closing box-office of films that opened in the first-run cinemas from the opening Saturday night of the release.

The dataset that forms the basis of this proposal is drawn from the city of Philadelphia for the years 1935-36. Housed in the Warner Bros. Archive at the University of Southern California, I have recently uncovered the weekly billing sheets of 91 cinemas located in the city belonging to the Stanley Warner chain. The sheets provide micro data of an unparalleled nature about audience choices, consisting of daily box-office returns generated by the films screened at the 91 cinemas. This body of data has never previously been accessed. Once transcribed onto a database and analysed, it will make possible a much fuller understanding of audiences and the choices they made. Furthermore, the work will be directly applicable to contemporary consumer behaviour concerning experience goods.

I am looking for a graduate student that has an excellent quantitative historical background, who is excited about executing detailed fieldwork in the city of Philadelphia; building a dataset from archive materials using relational database software; and finally modelling the data to investigate consumer behaviour. Knowledge of a programming language is desirable.