Gene Kang (’19)

This summer I interned in the Division of Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. I had the chance to work with two economists on their research projects related to the financial market. The first project I worked on was about the effect of ETF ownership on the volatility of the underlying stocks. Working on the project, I manipulated / cleaned very large datasets from four different sources using a statistical software called Stata, and prepared summary statistics charts and tables using LaTeX and Excel. I also replicated existing literature's results using the newly constructed dataset to confirm the integrity of the dataset. The second project I worked on was about the influence of firm-specific political risk on bank loan interest rates. With this project I was able to read numerous academic papers on the topic and familiarize myself with the research process in general. This was my first time working with real-world datasets and working with them posed a lot of challenges I had not encountered before. But it was a rewarding experience nonetheless. I really enjoyed working at the Fed; I loved my work and people at the Fed were very friendly and respectful. I believe that my experience at the Fed undoubtedly will serve as a vital stepping-stone to my future career in economics and finance.