Funding Science, Slowing Unfavorable Research—Job Market Paper

Between 1954 and 1998, the tobacco industry spent $355 million on academic research. I show that the industry’s funding decisions slowed research on the harmful effects of smoking, despite safeguards against industry interference. Using large language models to process internal industry documents, I build the first comprehensive dataset of academic researchers who applied for tobacco-industry grants and link them to bibliometric records. I first show that research projects on tobacco's health effects were systematically less likely to be funded than comparable ones on other topics. Using difference-in-differences, I then compare grantees' publications with those of near-miss applicants. Only funding for tobacco-health projects increased grantees’ relative likelihood of publishing on the topic, while this probability fell among nonrecipients. The industry therefore slowed unfavorable research by steering funding away from tobacco-health projects at a time when most publications on the topic incriminated the industry. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that an industry can distort scientific research through funding allocation, even under safeguards limiting its role in grant selection.

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 (joined 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