Compensation Structure and Team Performance

Format: Online
Number of Interns: 2
Duration of the Internship: 6 weeks
Start Date: 16 June, 2026
Finish Date: 31 July, 2026
Application Deadline: 8 May, 2026
Project Supervisor: Basak Altan, Gonul Sengul
Project Description: The student will assist in constructing a structured dataset combining NBA player salaries, roster information, game-level outcomes, player participation (minutes played), and lineup-level performance statistics. The work will focus on data collection, cleaning, organization, and documentation to prepare high quality datasets, ready to be used for econometric analysis.

Research Intern Responsibilities:

• Collecting and verifying player salary data by team and season.
• Compiling roster and player participation data (games played, minutes per game, season totals).
• Organizing team-level game statistics (point differential, offensive/defensive ratings, pace).
• Extracting and organizing lineup combinations and associated performance metrics.
• Constructing player co-appearance matrices indicating how frequently pairs of players appear together.
• Collecting player injury data.
• Cleaning and standardizing player identifiers across datasets.
• Producing clear documentation describing all variables, sources, and data construction steps.
• Preliminary Visualizations (plots, descriptive statistic tables etc).

Required Skills and Qualifications:

• Knowledge of basketball statistics and interpretation
• Comfort with spreadsheets (Excel)
• Strong attention to detail
• Reliability and commitment to accuracy
• Ability to follow structured instructions carefully
• Basic familiarity with data handling (Python/R or similar is a plus but not required)

Expected Learning Outcomes:

• Exposure to academic research in economics
• Training in structured data collection and management
• Experience working with real-world large datasets
• Development of data organization and documentation skills

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