Research for Business, Government, and Society

We analyze the effects of veto players when the set of available policies isn’t exogenously fixed, but rather determined by policy developers who work to craft new high-quality proposals. If veto players are moderate, there is active competition…

I highlight how mutual negative feedback between ethnic divisions, under-investment in public goods and violent conflict imply the presence of ethnic growth traps in many developing societies. I then identify important…

Background

Telemedicine is now a sustained modality of ambulatory surgical oncology care, yet its association with workforce utilization, patient volume, and visit type at high-volume academic centers remains understudied. Characterizing…

As LLMs become the default interface for search, news, and everyday problem-solving, they may filter and frame political information before citizens ever confront it. Identifying and mitigating partisan “bias”—output with a systematic slant…

With the climate crisis intensifying in urgency, the stakeholders of global companies are clamoring for more reliable reporting regarding a company’s overall carbon footprint as well as the emissions attributed to individual products and services…

How can we build trust, especially in polarized societies? We propose that exposure to broad financial markets—where individuals place their assets in the hands of large groups of unfamiliar agents who nonetheless have the incentive and ability…

In many settings, interventions may be more effective for some individuals than others, so that targeting interventions may be beneficial. We analyze the value of targeting in the context of a large-scale field experiment with over 53,000 college…

This report describes insights gleaned from the Data Fellows collaboration between PayPal and the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. By embedding researchers in PayPal’s charitable giving team,…

Since the 19th century, political reformers have proposed broadening civic and corporate governance by allowing voters to delegate to any other voter — sometimes known as liquid democracy. Today, systems like liquid democracy have become an…

The rise of marketplaces for goods and services has led to changes in the mechanisms used to ensure high quality. We analyze this phenomenon in the Uber market, where the system of pre-screening that prevailed in the taxi industry has been…

In a wide variety of applications, including healthcare, bidding in first price auctions, digital recommendations, and online education, it can be beneficial to learn a policy that assigns treatments to individuals based on their characteristics…

Many empirical studies of labor market questions rely on estimating relatively simple predictive models using small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets based on hand-engineered features. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on…

When choosing whether and how much to donate, potential donors often observe a set of default donation amounts known as an “ask string.” In an experiment with more than 400,000 PayPal users, we replace a relatively unused donation amount ($75) on…

This study investigates the labor market value of credentials obtained from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and shared on business networking platforms. We conducted a randomized experiment involving more than 800,000 learners, primarily from…

We examine how price discounts — a classic marketing incentive — drive children’s healthy choices in the understudied context of a developing economy. We partnered with UNICEF to launch three field experiments in Panamá among 2,418 children to…

Labor economists regularly analyze employment data by fitting predictive models to small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets. Although machine learning methods offer promise for such problems, these survey datasets are too small…

We evaluate a contest-based intervention intended to increase the usage of an educational app that helps children in India learn to read English. The evaluation included approximately 10,000 children, of whom about half were randomly selected to…

Can political beliefs, particularly about benefits of war versus peace, move thick financial markets? We document that following an unlikely victory by French citizen-soldiers during the German Siege of Paris (1870), prices of the highly liquid…

We study the dynamics between local segregation, partisanship, and political polarization. We exploit large-scale, exogenous and high-stakes peer assignment due to universal conscription of soldiers assigned from each of 34,947 municipalities to…

We conducted two experiments on PayPal’s Give at Checkout feature to learn about the effect of 1) information about charity outcomes on donations, and 2) exposure to these point-of-sale microgiving requests on subsequent giving. In this “…

In this paper, we study the design and analysis of experiments conducted on a set of units over multiple time periods where the starting time of the treatment may vary by unit. The design problem involves selecting an initial treatment time for…

The increasing frequency of severe wildfires demands a shift in landscape management to mitigate their consequences. The role of managed, low-intensity fire as a driver of beneficial fuel treatment in fire-adapted ecosystems has drawn interest in…

The rapid development of generative AI technology is transforming the political landscape, presenting both challenges and opportunities for the 2024 US election. This document provides a research-based overview of the potential impact of…

How can we democratically govern the AI, social media, and online platforms of the future? Today, low participation is a major barrier to community governance online. We leverage a digital quasi-experiment that allows us to study the links…