Home - uchicago-bfi-gnlab/lab_manual GitHub Wiki
About us
GNlab consists of two full-time PIs (G = Ganong, N = Noel) and four full-time predocs. We often also hire UChicago undergrads and PhD students for the summer or part-time.
Our lab is built around a high degree of in-person collaboration. We typically are together in-person three days a week and also have near-daily standup. More on lab goals
Hiring
We review applications for predoctoral research assistants in August and September. When our ad is live it will be listed on Workday
Alumni
Many of our alumni go on to PhDs in economics, although some work in the private sector or the public sector.
Here are three examples of papers written by our alumni:
- Credit When You Need It (Xian Ng, revise and resubmit at the American Economic Review)
- Build What and for Whom? The Distributional Effects of Housing Supply (Lei Ma, revise and resubmit at the American Economic Review)
- Improving 401(k) Matches Using Hypothetical Choices (Guillermo Carranza, revise and resubmit at the Quarterly Journal of Economics)
- Retention or Regressivity? The Empirical Effects of 401(k) Vesting Schedules (Guillermo Carranza, revise and resubmit at the Journal of Finance)
Conference
Every fall we host a conference for alumni to come back and present on their academic research as well as their policy work (last year we had a talk about using data to improve CTA bus operations).
^photo from our 2024 conference + more photos. We also had a conference in 2025 but we didn't take a good photo.
Public Goods
Our tools for agentic coding can be found in our template_repo
Documents for new RAs
Required Readings for New RAs:
- Goals, Norms, Rhythms, and Professional Development
- Task and Code Management Guide
- Pull Requests and Code Reviews
- Analyst, not a coder and common challenges
- Jargon
- Code style guide
- Exhibit guide
- IT Platform guide
There are a small number of documents which are not publicly shared. If you are a gnlab member, you can access those on the internal wiki.
We also highly recommend the fantastic manual by Matt Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro here. Many of the items in our guide build off that manual.