Geography, Expertise and Competition

How does geography affect the formation of professional expertise? How does expertise influence competition? Project goals: create a geographical atlas of auditing expertise in the U.S. and its effect on audit market competition, pricing, and quality.

Student Outcomes

Students will work closely with a senior professor on mapping the activities of U.S. auditing firms. Students will specifically learn to: Identify how geography affects business outcomes, identify business relationships and trends using Big Data methods, and create informative visuals based on quantitative data

Student Qualifications

Interest in creating beautiful and informative visuals, interest in working with large and complex data sets, and having basic knowledge of statistical and graphical packages such as Stata, R, and Tableau.

Student Responsibilities

The research assistant will help to: assemble complex data sets from multiple sources, map economic activity and competition using graphical tools, and create artistic visualizations that reveal how competition affects prices and quality.

Time Commitment

Flexible, based on student availability.