The Organization
The California Policy Lab (CPL) creates data-driven insights for the public good. Our mission is to improve the lives of Californians by generating evidence that transforms public policy. We do this by forming lasting partnerships between government and California’s flagship public universities to harness the power of research and administrative data.

Thank you for your interest!
The application for CPL’s 2023 Undergraduate Summer Institute is now closed.

We anticipate posting the application for the 2024 Institute in March 2024, and we also share opportunities like this via CPL’s newsletter: www.capolicylab.org/newsletter-signup.

Description of the California Policy Lab Undergraduate Summer Institute
Instituters will have the opportunity to develop and execute a project to completion using the University of California Consumer Credit Panel (UC-CCP), an anonymized 100% sample of credit records for Californians and an anonymized 2% sample of credit records nationally. The UC-CCP is a longitudinal panel of approximately 40 million consumers starting in 2004 and continuing quarterly through the present. The data is “big” and also sensitive, so we seek candidates who are adept at data wrangling and who demonstrate professionalism.

Using the UC-CCP, past Instituters studied:
• The effect of minimum wage increases on financial well-being
• Student debt burdens in California (later published as a CPL brief!)
• Post-wildfire displacement
• Measuring neighborhood change using households’ financial health

Click the photo below to see a slide-show and read about the experiences of five 2022 Summer Instituters 

Reminder: This program and other opportunities are promoted via the CPL newsletter www.capolicylab.org/newsletter-signup.