Ricardo Ruiz

Project: Optimal Policies to Battle the Coronavirus Infodemic Among Social Media Users in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Assisted in running an adaptive experiment using Facebook chatbots, experiment concluded with more than 10,000 individuals treated
• Wrote code to host an API that interacts with a Facebook chatbot to determine treatment assignments based on a bandit model generated from the history of individuals treated.
• Writing a wiki to make the code a public Github repository for other social science researchers to use.
• Writing a blog post to advertise the chatbot repository.

Project: Constrained Demand Estimation in the Market for Dialysis

• Currently, creating publication worthy tables, and binscatters for paper to present findings.
• Constructed dataset, by merging and cleaning various raw datasets provided by the United States Renal Data system to be used in a gibbs sampler for his paper on estimating constrained demand in the market for Dialysis.
• Learned gibbs sampling, and how to implement in JAGS and MATLAB.
• Worked on reorganizing project into a more straight forward, replicable structure - The structure now allows multiple projects to spawn from the work done to clean and generate datasets.

Project: Global Capital Allocations

• Wrote code to automate downloading of stock market data using Bloomberg's OpenFIGI API.
• Wrote VBA code to automate mass downloading of datasets on insurer asset holdings - previously, this was extremely time-consuming, with an inability to download the entire universe of data.
• Building/Maintaining various datasets.

Project: Advertisement in Mortgage Markets

• Constructed summary statistics and plots for various datasets.
• Conducted literature reviews.
• Compiled information on data sources; including price, description, and coverage information.
• Acquired datasets.

• Wrote code in python to solve a search and matching model and plot the impulse response functions for a paper by Bart Hobijn and Zheng Liu.
• Assisted in research attempting to explain inflation sources over the past two decades - Computed multifactor productivity for industries in the U.S.
• Ported code that solves linear rational expectations models from MATLAB (Gensys by Christopher A. Sims) to python.
• Wrote a python application that downloads data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters and the FRED database. It then creates plots to be used in papers and presentations.
• It then creates plots to be used in papers and presentations.
• General proofreading: papers and presentations.
• Acquired datasets.