Funding Science, Slowing Unfavorable Research—Job Market Paper

This paper provides the first causal evidence that private sponsors can shape grant allocation to slow research that threatens their interests. I study the tobacco industry, which spent $355 million on academic research into the causes of smoking-related diseases from 1954 to 1998. Applying large language models to internal industry documents and bibliometric data, I build the first comprehensive dataset of researchers who applied for the industry’s grants, linking their proposals and funding outcomes to their publications. Proposals on tobacco's health effects were less likely to be funded than comparable ones, a penalty imposed by the industry-appointed board of external scientists rather than by tobacco executives. Project quality is unlikely to explain this gap; closing it would have increased the number of funded tobacco-health projects by at least 25%. Difference-in-differences estimates comparing grantees with almost-granted applicants show that grants raised recipients’ likelihood of publishing on tobacco’s health effects only when the funded project studied this topic. This likelihood declined among almost-grantees with such proposals. By steering funding toward other topics, the industry thus slowed research on tobacco precisely when most of the resulting publications documented its harms. These findings call for stricter safeguards for allocating private research funding.

Presented at:  2025 MAER-Net Colloquium (Univerisity of Ottawa), BPER Lab Meeting (UC Berkeley Haas), EDGE Jamboree (LMU Munich), BID workshop (Toulouse School of Economics, scheduled for December).

Diversion Research (joint with Yann Bramoullé and Charles Figuières)

Between 1954 and 1998, the tobacco industry funded more than 1,900 research projects at a total cost of $355 million, on topics such as the roles of heredity and nutrition in cancer. Even though legitimate, this research was intended to divert attention from the harmful effects of tobacco. We provide the first formal analysis of such diversion research. We show that special interests may have strong incentives to affect the scientific agenda, even when the research itself is unbiased. This form of scientific lobbying can yield large welfare losses and raises concerns about the private funding of research.

Presented at: 4th International Conference on Environmental Economics (LEO), 6th QMUL Economics and Finance Workshop (Queen Mary University of London), 9th Mediterranean Workshop in Economic Theory (ESC Rennes School of Business), 5th AMSE Summer School (AMSE), 23rd Louis-André Gérard-Varet (AMSE),  17th Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare (PSE), 75th European meeting of the Econometric Society (Erasmus School of Economics),  AMSE Ph.D. Seminar. (AMSE),  Environmental Economics Seminar (CEE-M), Environmental Economics Seminar (TSE),  Workshop LOBBIES (CEE-M).

Capturing the Public Research Agenda through Scientific Lobbying