Research

Research papers

Hall of Mirrors: Corporate Philanthropy and Strategic Advocacy
(With Marianne Bertrand, Matilde Bombardini, Raymond Fisman, and Francesco Trebbi) Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2021, 136(4): pp.2413-2465.

Abstract: Information is central to designing effective policy, and policymakers often rely on competing interests to separate useful from biased information. We show how this logic of virtuous competition can break down, using a new and comprehensive dataset on U.S. federal regulatory rule-making for 2003-2016. For-profit corporations and non-profit entities are active in the rule-making process and are arguably expected to provide independent viewpoints. Policymakers, however, may not be fully aware of the financial ties between some firms and non-profits – grants that are legal and tax-exempt, but hard to trace. We document three patterns which suggest that these grants may distort policy. First, we show that, shortly after a firm donates to a non-profit, that non-profit is more likely to comment on rules on which the firm has also commented. Second, when a firm comments on a rule, the comments by non-profits that recently received grants from the firm’s foundation are systematically closer in content to the firm’s own comments, relative to comments submitted by other non-profits. Third, the final rule’s discussion by a regulator is more similar to the firm’s comments on that rule when the firm’s recent grantees also commented on it.

Improving Context Modeling in Neural Topic Segmentation
(with Linzi Xing, Giuseppe Carenini, and Francesco Trebbi) Presented at AACL-IJCNLP 2020

Tracing Influence at Scale: A Contrastive Learning Approach to Linking Public Comments and Regulator Responses.
(with Linzi Xing, Giuseppe Carenini) Presented at NMNLP 2023 - NLLP workshop

In Progress

10 New Facts About Regulation, Policy Change, and Public Comments (with Giuseppe Carenini, Francesco Trebbi)

Organization Name Matching with Contrastive Learning