About Me
I work at the intersection of research transparency, public policy and economics. My main research uses a standardized encoding of hypotheses and results to study which findings in economics get reported. I also work on increasing transparency throughout the evidence-to-policy pipeline, with a focus on policy analysis. Estimates of a policy’s costs and benefits should make their assumptions explicit, so that readers can inspect and modify them. I believe economics is entering a new stage in how evidence is reported and used in policy. I aspire to be part of the group of researchers studying and strengthening the link between evidence and policy.
Most recently, I worked at UC Berkeley as a staff researcher. There I developed a framework for transparency in policy analysis, along with demonstrations applied to real policy analyses. These let users modify the assumptions behind a policy’s estimated costs and benefits and trace a result from the headline number into the code. I also led a three-year project on the reporting of pre-registered results in economics. We tracked over 5,000 hypotheses from pre-registered RCTs and found that fewer than half had a publicly available result 8 to 9 years later. We then ran an RCT with the original research teams to identify the constraints behind unreported results (my job market paper).
Before that, I did my PhD in Public Policy at RAND, with a dissertation on making policy analysis more transparent and reproducible. Before my PhD, I studied economics (BA and master’s at U. de Chile, MA at UPenn) and worked in Chile’s public sector, evaluating social programs and conducting economic analysis of social policies.