Projects
Signaling through Open Source
In my recent study, we explored how contributions to open-source projects on GitHub influence employment and productivity. Leveraging a stratified sample of GHTorrent data tracking user activity since 2009 and Glassdoor salary data, we analyzed over 10 million observations spanning 139,829 individuals. Our findings revealed that signalers—those contributing to a firm’s open-source projects pre-hire—exhibited significantly higher post-hire productivity, averaging 437 additional contributions compared to non-signalers. However, signaling had minimal impact on wage premiums. This research was presented at the American Economic Association Mentorship Pipeline Conference.
The Cookie Conundrum
Working under Dr. Alex Miller, my current research project focuses on the relationship between consumers' propensity to accept website tracking technologies (e.g., cookies) and their brand affinity. More specifically, this research project investigates if the consent mechanisms enacted through laws like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) actually have the intended effects of regulating technology companies against exploiting consumers.
A Gentle Introduction to Surgery Theory
In this paper, we give a very gentle introduction of surgery theory, taking primarily a geometric approach to provide intuition. Section 1 motivates surgery theory. In Section 2, we then provide a stable foundation of fundamental concepts on manifolds and diffeomorphisms that will guide our later discussions. We then discuss in Section 3 Morse functions and handle decompositions that provide the tools of surgery. This finally leads us to actually formalize surgery and its connection to handle attachment. The paper finishes with a note on different applications of surgery theory.
