Rice University Research Repository
The Rice Research Repository (R-3) provides access to research produced at Rice University, including theses and dissertations, journal articles, research center publications, datasets, and academic journals. Managed by Fondren Library, R-3 is indexed by Google and Google Scholar, follows best practices for preservation, and provides DOIs to facilitate citation. Woodson Research Center collections, including Rice Images and Documents and the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice, have moved here.
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Recent Submissions
The Gerber Method: Using Multipliers for Daily Box Office Prediction
(Rice University, 2025) Gerber, Aidan; Jackson, Michael; McGuffey, Elizabeth; Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems
The movie industry is important to the United States both culturally and financially. A core part of the movie industry is exhibition at the domestic box office. This paper proposes and implements a model to predict the daily box office gross of a film over the entire course of its time in theaters. Using a novel approach based on daily, weekly, and seasonal multipliers, the model creates a robust time series which it updates as new data becomes available. To do this, comparison movies are found using a K-nearest neighbors model; then the individual characteristics of these similar movies are combined with a set of predicted multipliers. The model is trained on a dataset of over 3,000 movies and their box office grosses from 2015 to 2025. This approach is not only novel, but the daily time series modeling is something no other paper has attempted. Overall, we find very strong results with a median weighted mean absolute percentage difference (WMAPD) of 0.2.
Leveraged ETFs: The Key to Early Retirement?
(Rice University, 2025) Gan, Ryan; Shaw, Chad; McGuffey, Elizabeth; Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems
In modern day retirement planning, many people manage their investments themselves, investing in index funds that track broad market indices such as the S&P 500. This project investigates whether investing in leveraged Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) can provide a viable strategy for retirement investing. The study evaluates different leverage strategies to determine the optimal ratio to balance risk and reward. In order to measure portfolio performance, backtesting, bootstrapping, and Monte Carlo simulations will be done on historical stock price data from 1965 to 2024). This project aims to determine if leveraged ETFs can amplify returns without excessive risk, offering insights into their potential role in retirement portfolios. The results from this project show that highly-leveraged portfolios are risky for the average investor, but if one has a longer investment timeframe, slightly leveraging up an investment portfolio would give increased returns with limited risk.
The 2025 State of Housing in Harris County and Houston
(Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2025) Sherman, Stephen A.; Cheong, Caroline; Banerjee, Debolina; Kim, Andrew; Yang, Aram
Since 2020, the Kinder Institute for Urban Research has provided an in-depth snapshot and analysis of Harris County and Houston’s rapidly changing housing landscape. As each study has found, both renting and buying a home in the area has become increasingly unaffordable to many households, despite being nationally known as a city with much lower housing prices. As the region contends with this challenge, developers, government agencies, housing nonprofits, and other stakeholders are also aware of the increasing risks posed by extreme weather and climate change. This year’s report grapples with these dual challenges by monitoring core indicators of the housing market conditions and new indicators of environmental and climate impacts. Like previous reports, an array of indicators is also made available on the State of Housing Data Dashboard.
6.7 NGL Entreaty on Access and Equity
(Rice University, 2025) Sousa do Nascimento, Cibele Zolnier; Johnson, Alicia; Kato, Emma Sebunya; Vigar, Justin R.J.; Perez, Rolando; Kiattisewee, Cholpisit Ice; Molla, Kutubuddin
At the Spirit of Asilomar Summit, conversations about biotechnology’s future took center stage. One of the most important discussions was on Access and Equity, under the "Framing Biotechnology’s Future" theme - focusing on the barriers, needs, and opportunities for making science more accessible, especially for researchers from resource limited or low and middle-income countries. The original Asilomar Conference balanced innovation with responsibility, but failed to address equity. The 'Spirit of Asilomar' organizers were able to address that and position entreaties as a corrective to that oversight. As young leaders in biotech, we wanted to bring our experiences to the table - sharing the initiatives we’ve worked on, the challenges we’ve faced, and the opportunities we see to build a more inclusive and equitable field.
6.9 NGL Proposal for Spirit of Asilomar Fund
(Rice University, 2025) Perez, Rolando; Chappell, Callie; Flores, Wari Nkwi; Lopez, Andrea Isabel; Johnson, Alicia; Kiattisewee, Cholpisit; Zimmerman, Elise; Elcock, Leon B.; Emanuel, Kato Sebunya; Chavez, Maria; Rath, Shrestha; Lardner, Casey; Zolnier, Cibele; Palmer, Xavier-Lewis; Astolfi, Maria; Seah, Adeline
This entreaty is a call to ensure biotechnology is a tool for global flourishing by establishing the Spirit of Asilomar Fund. Fear caused the 1975 Asilomar meeting to build barriers that ultimately hindered the transformative potential of biotechnologies to enable global flourishing. The 2025 Spirit of Asilomar Summit emphasized that we are at a critical juncture for Biotechnology. The Summit revealed a continued fear of Biotechnology amongst the general public and a growing lack of trust between the public and biotechnologists. Biotechnology as a tool for global flourishing is only possible by considering its cultural, ecological, political, and historical contexts. The research enterprise must empower all people, not just some, to unlock Biotechnology's transformative power. To nurture these interdisciplinary biotechnological futures, we propose the establishment of a Spirit of Asilomar Fund. The Spirit of Asilomar Fund will support the transition to transform the Biotechnology enterprise towards rights- and community-based, interdisciplinary, and culturally-centered approaches to Biotechnology innovation and governance. Our overall goal is to foster the sustained, responsible and mindful development of biotechnologies for global benefit.