Vikram Rao

This is an informal research project exploring historical professional football statistics which I downloaded from www.profootballreference.com. For now, I have focused on team win-loss records and a few other season-level statistics over time. I created functions in Python to explore the data, then created a few statistics of my own which I plotted and ran through regression models and a Hodrick-Prescott Filter using R. Preliminary analysis of the data suggests that contrary to popular… Show more

This is an informal research project exploring historical professional football statistics which I downloaded from www.profootballreference.com. For now, I have focused on team win-loss records and a few other season-level statistics over time. I created functions in Python to explore the data, then created a few statistics of my own which I plotted and ran through regression models and a Hodrick-Prescott Filter using R. Preliminary analysis of the data suggests that contrary to popular beliefs, parity in the NFL has fallen in recent years. Show less

This paper began as my senior thesis at Princeton and I continued to work on parts of it following graduation. Using a two-sided market framework with a monopolist last-mile internet service provider, I studied how network neutrality legislation would impact social welfare. The paper contains a theoretical section that characterizes profit and welfare-maximizing price levels and a market simulation written in Java. The simulator uses a gradient ascent optimization algorithm to solve for profit… Show more

This paper began as my senior thesis at Princeton and I continued to work on parts of it following graduation. Using a two-sided market framework with a monopolist last-mile internet service provider, I studied how network neutrality legislation would impact social welfare. The paper contains a theoretical section that characterizes profit and welfare-maximizing price levels and a market simulation written in Java. The simulator uses a gradient ascent optimization algorithm to solve for profit and welfare-maximizing price levels under various assumptions about model parameters. Show less

This is an empirical paper examining how the Cesarean Section medial procedure is affected by non-clinical factors. Past research had shown that in many cases, socioeconomic factors had a surprisingly large influence on whether a woman chose to have a C-Section. Using the Fragile Families dataset, I provided evidence to the contrary. The data analysis was done in Stata and involved creation of new variables and logistical regression.