Research
Working Papers
An Experimental Exploration of Reasonable Doubt. With Jason Aimone, Stanton Hudja, Charles North, Jason Ralston, and Lucas Rentschler. Accepted at the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. Working Paper on SSRN.
Work in Progress
Provider Training and Treatment Intensity: Evidence from Primary Care Moves (with Michael R Richards and Steve Schwab)
The Value of Carnegie Classification in Higher Education. (with James West)
Intergenerational Mobility: Equal Opportunity and Talent Allocation.
Published
Government by Code? Blockchain Applications to Public Sector Governance. With Bustamante P, Cai M, Gomez M, Harris C, Krishnamurthy P, Madison MJ, Murtazashvili I, Murtazashvili JB, Mylovanov T, Shapoval N, Vee A, and Weiss M. Frontiers in Blockchain. 2022.
We review blockchain applications in public sector governance. The decentralized and distributed features of blockchain allow it to link up loosely connected private organizations and public agencies to improve the efficiency and transparency of government transactions. The potential for improvement is vast, but the existing applications have not extended much beyond limited-scale pilots.
The Impact of Chief Diversity Officers on Diverse Faculty Hiring. With Steven W. Bradley, James R. Garven, James E. West. Southern Economic Journal. 2022 (Lead article). NBER Working Paper. Georgescu-Roegen Prize for 2023 (best academic article published in the Southern Economic Journal for the year).
Combining uniquely collected data with a comprehensive public survey, we examine whether installing a Chief Diversity Officer is associated with higher diverse hiring. We employ state-of-the-art difference-in-differences techniques that allow for variation in adoption timing and heterogeneous treatment effects over time and by treatment group. We find that the confidence intervals of the effects tightly contain zero.
Media coverage: Chronicles of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Marginal Revolution
Blockchain Networks as Constitutional and Competitive Polycentric Orders. With Eric Alston, Ilia Murtazashvili, and Martin Weiss. Journal of Institutional Economics. 2022.
Blockchain networks are often thought of as being governed by code and hence self-governed. We explain how they are governed by a core team of developers, miners, users, and, indirectly, by the market. As they compete with other networks in the market by product differentiation, they are indirectly governed by the users through the market mechanism.
Ideological Proximity, Issue Importance, and Vote Choice. With Patrick Flavin. Electoral Studies. 2022.
What proportion of voters selects their candidate based on policy proximity? More than 80% of the vote choices are consistent with proximity voting. Among these ideological voters, we find that a one standard deviation change in relative proximity for an extremely important issue has a similar substantive effect on vote choice as partisan identification (moving from Independent to a Not Very Strong Democrat or Republican).
Can Permissionless Blockchains Avoid Governance and the Law? With Eric Alston, Ilia Murtazashvili, and Martin Weiss. Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies. 2021.
No. Legal scholars recognize the significance of law in the use of blockchain, but legal and institutional research often leaves blockchain governance as something of a black box. We provide a more granular analysis, finding that blockchain governance operates on four distinct levels: governance at the protocol layer, subsidiary governance arises from the need for communities to draft protocol updates, competitive governance in the market, and superior governance in terms of a variety of laws and regulations due to how cryptocurrencies implicate property, contracts, tax, and securities law.
The chronic uncertainty of American Indian property rights. With Eric Alston, Adam Crepelle, and Ilia Murtazashvili. Journal of Institutional Economics. 2021.
American Indians are poor not because of a lack of property rights. Political and legal autonomy, administrative and enforcement capacity, political constraints, and accessible legal institutions were critical to American Indians’ struggles.
Decomposing Political Advertising Effects on Vote Choices. Public Choice. 2020.
Political advertising studies often try to determine whether ads mobilize people to vote or persuade them to switch candidates. Using a dynamic discrete choice model, I quantify what proportion of the advertising effects flow through the two channels. About 60-70% of the advertising effect is persuasion, and 30-40% of it is mobilization.
Is Blockchain the Next Step in the Evolution Chain of [Market] Intermediaries? With Marcela Gomez, Pedro Bustamante, Martin B. H. Weiss, Ilia Murtazashvili, Michael J. Madison, Tymofiy Mylovanov, Herminio Bodon, and Prashant Krishnamurthy. Conference Proceeding of TPRC47: The 47th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy 2019.
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