Ziyi Liu, a Master of Public Policy with Certificate in Research Methods (MACRM) student at Harris Public Policy, is working with Harris Assistant Professor Shaoda Wang on a project that investigates how populism contributed to the anti-nuclear regulations in democracies after Chernobyl. They are quantifying the associated environmental, economic and welfare implications. His fellowship consists of literature reviews, data scraping, text analysis and a questionnaire survey. Overall, Liu’s research interests include causal inference with observational data and computational social science. He is also interested in political economics, studying the changes of political attitudes via social media data.

“I am learning and practicing the skills of dealing with a large scale of text data and conducting causal inference with them. So far, the experience has been a good opportunity to learn about frontier economics.”