Ongoing Research Projects

Grant Period : Aug 2024 - Jul 2029

Faculty : Lea Bou SLEIMAN

My research agenda for the coming years includes the following areas:
1. Investigating the impacts of environmental policies in urban areas from urban, environmental, and political perspectives. This includes several papers focused on Paris as well as studies on other cities.
2. Addressing transportation issues in developing countries.
3. Examining bus procurement challenges and the electrification of bus fleets.

Grant Period : Jan 2024 - Dec 2025

Faculty : ZHENG Huanhuan

This proposal delves into the fiscal behaviors of local Chinese governments during the three years of the zero-Covid policy, as they grapple with soaring public expenditures on health and policy enforcement. By exploring potential determinants of debt capacity, such as fiscal space, financial decentralization, technological innovation, and entrepreneurship, this proposal seeks to uncover a roadmap to bolster fiscal resilience responses during large-scale public emergencies, aiding in the formulation of robust policy-making and financial strategies for future challenges.

Grant Period : Feb 2022 - Feb 2027

Faculty : Ashutosh Dinesh THAKUR

In many organizations, members need to be assigned to certain positions, whether these are civil servants to states, legislators to committees, or executives to roles. Who gets what position crucially affects the performance of the organization, the efficacy of its operations, the synergies/conflicts generated, and the resulting satisfaction/aspiration of its members. I use tools from market design and matching theory to i) empirically evaluate, ii) theoretically understand, and iii) practically improve the design of these assignment procedures.

I explore new applications of matching theory in public administration, e.g., allocating Indian civil servants to states and assigning US Senators to legislative committees. My empirical analysis leverages the institutional knowledge of the underlying matching mechanisms along with new preference data of US Senators and Indian Civil servants to evaluate the efficacy of the procedures and their impact on outcomes (e.g., American legislative policymaking and party discipline, and India’s state capacity and development outcomes).

Theoretically, my projects shed light on institutional stability and organizational culture: why organizations endogenously change their assignment procedures over time, which coalitions lobby for change, and when are they successful. Lastly, my work delivers practical design improvements for Indian civil service allocation procedures and other two-sided market platforms.

Grant Period : Sep 2021 - Aug 2026

Faculty : Lawrence JIN

I investigate the role of behavioral biases in decision-making, and explore behavioral interventions (“nudges”) that can help improve public welfare. Specifically, I study decision-making in two settings: medicine and transportation.

The first setting is medical decision-making. For example, I study the behavior of diabetes patients in Singapore. Diabetes is a major public health problem in Singapore, costing over $1 billion annually to manage as a nation. The first step is to use data from SingHealth’s diabetes patient registry to empirically investigate behavioral & medical anomalies, and generate insights on the types of behavioral interventions that could help patients with glycemic control. Using the insights, I will design a comprehensive behavioral intervention program for the patients and test its effectiveness in the field.

The second setting is taxi drivers’ decision-making. In an earlier work, I found that taxi drivers tend to drive unnecessarily at the airport, which lowers their earnings and generates unnecessary air pollution.I will use the data from Singapore’s LTA to investigate other locations at which drivers often make similar mistakes, as well as other potential behavioral biases. Then, we will design and conduct a field experiment to “nudge” drivers to reduce their mistakes, which would in turn increase their income and reduce unnecessary air pollution in Singapore.