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. Economics and policy analysis have made great progress in generating credible evidence, but are still behind in how it is reported and used in policy. I want to help close that gap.
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.