# Vansh Gupta

> Vansh Gupta is a PhD student in innovation economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management (Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Strategic Management — TIES, 2025–2030). He studies where ideas come from — incentives, place, brains, and government — with particular focus on open-source innovation, public goods provision, and state capacity. Email: vansh@mit.edu.

Key facts:

- PhD student, MIT Sloan School of Management, Behavioral & Policy Sciences (TIES group), 2025–2030. S.M. in Management Research expected 2027. Kalim Family Fund Fellowship (2025); MIT Sloan Doctoral Fellowship (2026–30).
- Research affiliate, Innovation Growth Lab (Nesta / Barcelona School of Economics). UK Biobank approved researcher.
- Previously: Associate & Data Scientist at Charles River Associates (antitrust & competition, 2023–25, CRA Innovation Award 2024 and 2025); Dean's Summer Research Fellow at Columbia Business School with Jorge Guzman (2022); Data Reproducibility Researcher at the American Economic Association under Lars Vilhuber (2021).
- Education: dual B.S. from Cornell University (2020–23) — Biometry & Statistics (Bowers CIS) and Applied Economics & Management (Dyson), magna cum laude, research honors thesis with distinction.
- Working languages: Python, R, Stata, Java, MATLAB, SQL. Methods: causal inference, multi-modal LLM inference for measurement, geospatial analysis.

## Research

- [Better Keep the Twenty Dollars: Incentivizing Innovation in Open Source](https://www.nber.org/papers/w31668): with Annamaria Conti, Jorge Guzman, and Maria Roche. Revise & Resubmit at Management Science; NBER Working Paper 31668. Using data on ~100,000 GitHub users around the launch of GitHub Sponsors: opting in to sponsorship (without money) raises output, but actually receiving sponsorship has a long-lasting negative effect on innovation — extrinsic rewards crowd out the intrinsic motivation open source runs on.
- Local Government State Capacity: Evidence from Brazil: with Michael Best, Renata Lemos, and Daniela Scur (in progress). Reads 16.4 million paragraphs of Brazilian municipal gazettes with a multi-stage LLM cascade to build the first high-frequency measure of municipal state capacity.
- Municipal Responses to Natural Disasters: Evidence from Brazilian Municipalities: with Michael Best, Renata Lemos, and Daniela Scur (in progress). Pairs the gazette measure with flood records to trace what disasters do to local state capacity.
- Welfare Economics of Incentives and Innovations in Public Goods: solo (in progress). When does paying for public-goods innovation help, when does it crowd out, and who should be paid nothing at all?
- [Approaches and Resources for Improved Student Outcomes: Evidence from Brazil](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4394638): Cornell research honors thesis, 2023.

## Software

- [STE — Strategic Treatment Effects](https://github.com/g-vansh/STE): open-source R package estimating heterogeneous treatment effects of strategic choices, companion to Guzman's "Treatment Effects in Managerial Strategies".
- [Upload-to-Zenodo](https://github.com/AEADataEditor/Upload-to-Zenodo): Python utility syncing research archives to Zenodo; used by the AEA Data Editor's replication lab.

## Pages

- [Home](https://www.vansh-gupta.com/): overview and selected work.
- [Research](https://www.vansh-gupta.com/research.html): all papers with abstracts and links.
- [Software](https://www.vansh-gupta.com/software.html): open-source tools.
- [CV](https://www.vansh-gupta.com/cv.html): timeline; full PDF at https://www.vansh-gupta.com/files/CV___Vansh_Gupta.pdf.
- [Map](https://www.vansh-gupta.com/map.html): the career drawn as a transit diagram.

## Profiles

- [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VLDgDyAAAAAJ)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/g-vansh)
- [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6221-1247)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/vansh-g/)
- [X / Twitter](https://twitter.com/VanshG_)
- [MIT Sloan profile](https://mitsloan.mit.edu/programs/phd/vansh-gupta)