Raphael Zhang / Research Statement
Research statement.
I’m an undergraduate economics student at the University of California, Davis, specializing in International Macro-Finance. My interests include macroeconomics, monetary policy, financial economics, public policy, international macroeconomics, and artificial intelligence.
Research background
My research experience includes working with historical price records, political-speech text, and administrative data. As a research assistant in the UC Davis Economics Department, I contributed to two projects with substantial data collection and preparation components.
On the Global Price Initiative Project, from September 2024 to September 2025, I used machine learning to extract historical price data from newspapers. My work included labeling and validating data, managing a large-scale database, and analyzing economic trends.
On the Economic Narratives in Political Speech Project, from January to June 2026, I built Python scraping and OCR pipelines to curate political-speech text from around the world. I prepared these data for economic narrative analysis and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and LLM workflows.
Applied policy work
Since June 2026, I have worked as a student assistant at the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration. I conduct research on California’s cannabis market using econometric models and administrative data to estimate tax effects and forecast revenue. I also support revenue estimates and policy recommendations concerning prediction markets, gasoline markets, and proposed ballot measures.
My work for the National College Federal Reserve Challenge focuses on interest rates, inflation, economic indicators, and market conditions, with the aim of developing and presenting recommendations for the federal funds rate.
Methods & preparation
My coursework includes econometrics, microeconomic and macroeconomic theory, calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, finance, and international economics. I work with Python, R, Stata, and MATLAB, and have experience with web scraping, OCR, data cleaning, API use, and LLM-assisted text analysis.
These experiences have given me practice in building datasets and applying empirical tools to economic questions.
Questions I want to explore
Currently, I am exploring how Federal Reserve and Central banks develop and deploy their policy model. Beyond economics, I am also exploring the local deloypment of LLM and Agentic AI, and learning basic knowdelge of neural network, machine learning, langchain and etc...