Hi Hassan!

I relate with the challenge of finding information availability on my research—it is often difficult to find coverage on every single subsidy case. Consequently, I also took a similar mitigating approach by broadening my focus and searching for the parent company instead of the specific company name.

Best of luck with your research :)

• What new ideas, challenges, or other issues have you encountered with regard to your project (this might include data collection, information that contradicts your assumptions or the assertions of others, materials that have enriched your understanding of the topic or led you to change your project, etc.)? How have these ideas or challenges shaped the bigger picture of your research? Has the scope or focus of your topic changed since you began this project? If so, how?

Issues that come with scavenging media coverage for over 1800 subsidy cases are naturally abound to arise. Currently, one of my biggest problems is: how do I optimize my search within the LexisNexis database in order to ensure that I don't accidentally mis-label subsidy cases that may actually have media coverage as "no coverage"? I'm countering this problem through a common searching procedure that makes me narrow all search categories under "jobs" to the parent company, the state, and when applicable, the name of the subsidy program. This has been extremely effective for me.

• What research resources have proven particularly useful to you as you continue your research?

Goodjobsfirst.org offers a database of subsidies and allows me to double check whether I'm searching for the right subsidy. Sometimes, I may have the exact same subsidy program under the same state for a company but the subsidy may occur in a different county, so this website is very useful for me to double check.

Hey Evan,

I'm particularly excited about the significance of your research in the NLP community. One question I'd have would be: fallacious can, at times, be a vague term; how can programming determine which arguments are fallacious? Consequently, how would you plan to alleviate this issue through your code?

Super excited to see the rest of your research!

• While all Laidlaw Scholars will be presenting their research at the Columbia Undergraduate Research Symposium in the fall, what are the more immediate expectations that you have for your research? Are you writing a paper you hope to get published? Will your research be part of a larger scientific study? Is your research now the first phase of a project you’ll continue to work on throughout the year, and/or next summer? Now that we are nearing the one month mark of the program, please write about your expectations for your research.

Based on my current progress, I expect that my research will show that media coverage can be an effective accountability mechanism for firms to meet their job creation target when given a subsidy. I plan to help my professors finish the raw data this summer for our research, then potentially help with the paper if possible.

• Why does your research matter? Explain the significance of the question you are investigating, and why you are interested in it.

My research is extremely important in investigating whether firms are actually committed to ESG goals. Often, there is a negative portrayal of the media. Consequently, it is important to evaluate whether media coverage can actually bring a positive effect in holding firms accountable to create jobs for the communities around them.

Hey Hassan!

You bring up a good point with the ethical issue of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. I'd also like to point out that, empirically, these sorts of agreements which provide small benefits with significant long-term consequences often create an unhealthy codependency culture which can hinder a country's development in the long-term.

Best of luck with your project :)

• What are some of the ethical issues that you are grappling with in your research? What are some of the ways in which you are responding to these questions?

My task of research under my PIs involves mostly database scavenging for subsidy media coverage, so I believe there are not many ethical issues I currently have to grapple with. However, one potential concern in the overall research project we are doing includes an ethical side for firms; do they ethically use the subsidies given by the government for ESG goals (eg. increasing employment within the region, committing to environmentally friendly production, etc.)?

Furthermore, a potential ethical concern is the intent behind media—journalism can often be used for ulterior motives such as political campaigns, and it is important that I keep that in mind as I note key numerical details from articles. A way I'm counteracting this is looking for multiple articles which cover the same subsidy in order to gain a more nuanced perspective.

• As you continue your research, have you considered alternative viewpoints in your investigation? If so, how have these alternative viewpoints enriched or changed your project?

My research project involves collecting data first BEFORE exploring various viewpoints. Economics at the academia level involves extremely heavy math, making it very logic-oriented and, at times, not open to alternative viewpoints. However, I do plan to consider alternate viewpoints as I work with my PIs to explore the next steps of this paper once the raw data has been sorted out.

• Last week the trainings and discussions we had cut across the disciplines. How does the interdisciplinary nature of this program, the fact that students are focusing on such a diverse range of projects, help you think about your project and/or your academic interests more broadly?

I think that the interdisciplinary nature of Laidlaw is helpful as different research projects will require different methodologies; for example, humanities will most likely be more qualitative than the quantitative nature of STEM research. Consequently, as someone who is researching economics—which settles in the awkward in-between of humanities and STEM— I can learn methods from my humanities-oriented peers as well as methods from my STEM-oriented peers and possibly apply it to my future economics research projects.

• As you begin your individual research projects this week, do you anticipate any challenges in getting started? If so, what are they?

My main job under my faculty is to work on scavenging for media coverage in Lexis Nexis. Thus, I anticipate one of my main challenges to be how to efficiently find media coverage on each individual subsidy case. Another challenge may be efficiently executing one of my other main tasks, which is identifying the type of media coverage; nowadays, journalism and political coverage get conflated so it may be hard for me to distinguish between the two.