Alix Bonargent

Hello!

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE.) I will be on the job market in 2023/2024.

I study the interaction between policymaking and academic research, focusing on how politics shapes research projects and how research is utilized in policy decisions.

My job market paper looks at how partnerships between policymakers and researchers are formed, and how they impact evidence uptake.

You can find my CV here.

Email: a.m.bonargent@lse.ac.uk

RESEARCH

JOB MARKET PAPER

Can Research with Policymakers Change the World?

[Draft coming soon]

Over the past two decades, economists have increasingly sought to collaborate with policymakers in designing and executing research projects, as a way to achieve greater policy relevance. However, the extent to which such partnerships lead to actual policy changes remains underexplored, partly due to the lack of available data. To address this question, I construct a unique dataset of over 500 academic research projects in the field of development economics, which includes information on the level of policymakers’ involvement at the proposal stage and tracks changes in policy decisions observed following project implementation. Projects developed in partnership with policymakers are 15 to 20 percentage points more likely to result in observed policy change. This relationship is fully conditional on academic achievement (i.e., publication), suggesting that it does not result from a sorting of policymakers into policy-oriented studies of limited academic value. Local political conditions affect when and where these partnerships are formed. I identify a “window of opportunity” for researcher-policymaker partnerships coinciding with the election cycle: these collaborations most often occur earlier in the term when political conditions are conducive to experimentation and reform.

SELECTED WORK-IN-PROGRESS

How Do Researchers Communicate with Policymakers?

Learning or Herding? Mechanisms of Policy Diffusion among Practitioners

TEACHING

COURSES

Economics for Public Policy (EC230) at LSE, 2018-2021

(taught by Mohan Bijapur and Daniel Sturm)

AWARDS