Papers from the field

Better Keep the Twenty Dollars: Incentivizing Innovation in Open Source

w/ Annamaria Conti (IE), Jorge Guzman (Columbia) & Maria Roche (HBS) · Revise & Resubmit, Management Science · NBER WP 31668

Everyone agrees open-source software matters. Nobody quite knows how to pay for it. Using fine-grained data on ~100,000 GitHub users around the launch of the Sponsors program, we find that opting in (without money) raises output — but actually receiving sponsorship has a long-lasting negative effect on innovation, regardless of the amount. The decline shows up in community- and service-oriented work, not in coding effort: extrinsic rewards crowd out the intrinsic motivation open source runs on.

NBER WP SSRN NBER Bulletin HBS Working Knowledge

Local Government State Capacity: Evidence from Brazil

w/ Michael Best (Columbia), Renata Lemos (World Bank) & Daniela Scur (Cornell) · in progress

What do local governments actually do all day? Every Brazilian municipality publishes an official daily gazette; we read essentially all of them — 16.4 million paragraphs, labelled with a multi-stage LLM cascade — to construct the first high-frequency measure of municipal state capacity: hiring, procurement, emergency response, and the daily machinery of government.

Municipal Responses to Natural Disasters: Evidence from Brazilian Municipalities

w/ Michael Best, Renata Lemos & Daniela Scur · in progress

Brazil floods constantly and predictably. Pairing the gazette measure with flood records, we trace what disasters do to the capacity of the local state — what governments drop, what they protect, and how long recovery of the day-to-day machinery takes.

Welfare Economics of Incentives and Innovations in Public Goods

solo · in progress

If paying for public-goods innovation can backfire, what does the welfare-maximizing incentive scheme look like? A framework for when money helps, when it crowds out, and who should be paid nothing at all.