Winter Research Scholarship
The UQ Winter Research Scholarship Program offers scholarships to students wishing to undertake a research internship over the winter vacation period.
Research internships provide students with the opportunity to work with a researcher in a formal research environment so that they may experience the research process and discover what research is being undertaken in their field of interest at UQ.
Some students may qualify to receive a scholarship for the duration of their internship.
View scholarship guidelines and how to apply
We do not require you to obtain tentative supervisor approval prior to submitting your application.
Projects available in the School of Economics
| Health inequality in Australia | |
Project duration, hours of engagement & delivery mode | 4 weeks, 30 hours per week 26 June – 21 July |
Description | This project is an empirical study of mental health and healthcare utilisation in Australia. We aim first to establish the extent of health inequality in Australia and second to identify correlates and causal channels impacting mental health and healthcare utilisation, with a focus on environmental and social factors (e.g., neighbourhood/peer effects). The student would be expected to perform basic empirical analysis (descriptive and causal) using the HILDA dataset. |
Suitable for | This project is suitable for Economics students with experience in quantitative methods, and ideally some prior experience in health economics. |
Supervisors | Dr Chris Rose, Dr Mohamad Khaled, Prof Brenda Gannon |
Further info |
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| Dynamic pricing experiment for electric vehicle charging | |
Project duration, hours of engagement & delivery mode | 4 weeks, 36 hours per week 26 June – 21 July |
Description | This project uses a field experiment to evaluate whether price incentives for electric vehicle (EV) charging enable consumers to capture greater benefits of EVs while lowering the costs of the renewable transition. This evidence will inform current and prospective EV owners, policymakers, network owners and operators, and electricity retailers. The candidate will undertake a literature review, assist in data cleaning and undertake preliminary analysis of data from the live field experiment in electric vehicle charging. |
Suitable for | The role would suit a candidate with skills in coding, especially in Stata, and a student that has taken an applied econometrics course such as Causal Inference for Microeconometrics (ECON7360) or Econometrics of Panel Data and Discrete Variables (ECON7371). |
Supervisors | Dr Chris Rose, Dr Mohamad Khaled, Prof Brenda Gannon |
Further info |
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| Pandora’s Box in a world with many items | |
Project duration, hours of engagement & delivery mode | 4 weeks, 30 hours per week 26 June – 21 July |
Description | A large class of economic problems involve an agent interested in exploring different alternatives before choosing the best among them. For instance, firms explore different markets before selecting in which of them to operate, workers search for different job opportunities before accepting an offer, and investors assess several ventures before deciding which projects to fund. Naturally, exploration is costly but it provides the agent a random reward. The distinctive characteristic of all these examples is their inherent nature as sequential and ordered search problems. In the simplest and most natural case, one would assume that the agent incurs a fixed cost to search across alternatives aiming to ``allocate'' one single unit of the indivisible ``asset'' she holds. In the realm of our motivating examples this implies firms searching for exactly one single market to operate, workers seeking employment in a single job, and venture capitalists aiming to allocate exactly one package of funds. A solution to this problem was proposed in a seminal paper by Weitzman (1979). His solution is based on the determination of a collection of reservation values, and specifies both a selection and a stopping rule. The former requires to search next the ``unsampled'' alternative with the highest reservation value, whereas the latter dictates to terminate the search whenever the maximum sampled reward exceeds the reservation value of every unsampled alternative. Although Weitzman's setup is mathematically elegant, our key economic observation is that in most real-life applications agents hold more than one unit. In other words, they deal with sophisticated multi-unit search problems where they must simultaneously decide (i) the order in which alternatives are explored; and (ii) how to optimally allocate their units among the explored alternatives. For instance, firms might explore different markets and find optimal to simultaneously operate in several of them. Equivalently, workers might apply for different vacancies and find optimal to partially accept more than one job, and venture capitalists might want to optimally fund multiple projects. In this project, we specifically solve for the optimal policy of these sequential and ordered multi-unit search problems. The complexity of the solution substantially increases, relative to the single-unit framework, since we need to characterize the optimal policy that now must specify how to optimally allocate all units among the alternatives already explored by the agent. To start disentangling the intricacies of this problem, we will start adopting several numerical simulations that could guide us in the implementation of the optimal solution. |
Suitable for | This project is suitable for students in Economics, Statistics, Mathematics, and Computer Science with a fairly good command of languages like MATLAB and Python. |
Supervisor | Dr Allan Hernández-Chanto |
Further info |
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| Empirical security-bid auctions | |
Project duration, hours of engagement & delivery mode | 4 weeks, 30 hours per week 26 June – 21 July |
Description | Every year, hundreds of public and private organisations around the world sell the rights to control projects (assets) that are worth millions of dollars. For instance, governments allocate the rights to exploit natural resources (e.g., oil, gas, and timber), construct and operate public infrastructure (e.g., ports or highways), and use their national electromagnetic spectrum. Likewise, corporations sell the rights to control companies via take-over operations, and entrepreneurs compete for resources from venture capital firms. In all these examples, sellers can use either standard cash auctions, or auctions in which the payment received is conditioned on the revenue generated by the project once it is implemented. Contingent payments are viable whenever the project to be allocated generates verifiable cash flows over which is possible to contract. When this is the case, sellers can use financial instruments (securities), other than cash, to secure the payment from winning bidders. |
Suitable for | The project is suitable for a student with a background in economics, finance, applied mathematics, or computer science. Preferably (but not necessary), students who have taken intermediate microeconomics as undergraduates The successful candidate must be proficient with Matlab. Ideally, the candidate has also knowledge of R and Python. |
Supervisors | Dr Dong-Hyuk Kim & Dr Allan Hernandez-Chanto |
Further info |
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| Investigating student engagement in homogeneous groups through the three-colour innovation model | |
Project duration, hours of engagement & delivery mode | 4 weeks, 30 hours per week 26 June – 21 July |
Description | This research project aims to investigate students' engagement (behavioural, affective, and cognitive) as they experience the three-colour innovation model in ECON3210 (Financial Markets and Institutions), an advanced undergraduate-level course offered in blended mode. The innovation model is implemented during the course tutorials and is designed to foster peer learning in homogenous groups, customised to each student's level of confidence and preparedness. The model is based on the principles of homogenous groups, which has been shown to promote confidence and self-esteem, encourage critical inquiry, and facilitate a deeper understanding of concepts (Briggs, 2020; Boud et al., 2001). Despite the suggested benefits of peer learning in homogenous groups, little yet is known on the impacts this group arrangement has on students’ engagement, particularly, when comparing online and in-person instructional settings. This research project seeks to fill this gap by investigating the effect of the three-color innovation model on student engagement, examining behavioural, affective, and cognitive indicators through class observations, weekly engagement and feedback quizzes, focus groups with students and the analysis of students’ demographics and grades from MySinet, Blackboard and Course Insights. This research project is expected to provide avenues for the improvement of student engagement, which will benefit not only ECON3210 students but also any other stakeholders interested in implementing/trialling the model in their own teaching context. Confirmation of Project Duration (4 weeks) and number of hours/week (20-36 hours/week): The project will take place between 26 June - 21 July (4 weeks) and the selected student is expected to work 25-30 hours a week (approximately 5-6 hours a day) both on campus and remotely. |
Suitable for | The project is suitable for a student with a background in economics, applied mathematics, statistics and/or education. The successful candidate must be proficient in quantitative data analysis and preferably (but not necessarily) have experience in conducting literature reviews. The student scholar is also expected to be able to work independently and in collaboration with the project team members. |
Supervisor | Dr. Frederique Bracoud |
Further info |
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