Research

Publications

• Sorting for K-Street: Post-Employment Regulations and Wage Setting in Congress
  The Journal of Politics, 2025, 87(2):664-679
  
  Abstract

  While post-employment regulations are a common tool to slow the revolving door in government, little is known about their effectiveness and consequences. Using the 2007 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA), I argue that policymakers strategically adjust their behaviors to maintain lucrative career options in the lobbying industry. HLOGA prohibited staffers-turned-lobbyists who earn at least 75% of a Congress member’s salary from contacting their ex-employers in Congress for one year. Using data on the complete set of congressional staff (2001-2016), I show that staffers sort below the salary threshold post-HLOGA. Employing various panel data analyses, I also find that selecting out of the regulation increases a staffer’s probability to become a lobbyist and ensures a substantial premium in revenues at the beginning of their lobbying career. These results explain why reforms of the revolving door fail and provide insights on institutional determinants of career incentives for non-elected public officials.
  
  article
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• Multilanguage Word Embeddings for Social Scientists: Estimation, Inference and Validation Resources for 157 Languages
  with Pedro L. Rodriguez, Arthur Spirling, and Brandon M. Stewart
  Political Analysis, 2025, 33(2):156-163
  2022 PolMeth Best Poster Award
  
  Abstract

  Word embeddings are now a vital resource for social science research. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to obtain high quality embeddings for non-English languages, and it may be computational expensive to do so. In addition, social scientists typically want to make statistical comparisons and do hypothesis tests on embeddings, but this is non-trivial with current approaches. We provide three new data resources designed to ameliorate the union of these issues: (1) a new version of fastText model embeddings, fit to Wikipedia corpora; (2) a multi-language “a la carte” (ALC) embedding version of the fastText model fit to Wikipedia corpora; (3) a multi-language ALC embedding version of the well-known GloVe model fit to Wikipedia corpora. These materials are aimed at “low resource” users who lack access to large corpora in their language of interest, or who lack access to the computational resources required to produce high-quality vector representations. We make these resources available for 30 languages, along with a code pipeline for another 127 languages available from Wikipedia corpora. We provide extensive validation of the materials, via reconstruction tests and some translation proofs-of-concept. We also conduct and report on human crowdworker tests, for our embeddings for Arabic, French, (traditional, Mandarin) Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.
  
  article
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• Political Power of Bureaucratic Agents: Evidence from Policing in New York City
  Conditionally accepted at the Journal of Politics
  
  Abstract

  To what extent can bureaucrats manipulate public service provision for explicitly political ends? A growing body of work highlights the immense ability of bureaucrats to influence governments through campaign contributions, endorsements, collective bargaining, and organized election turnout. I explore a more fundamental mechanism of bureaucratic influence: bureaucrats strategically shirking responsibilities. Politicians depend on bureaucrats to achieve policy goals. This gives the latter leverage over the former. If bureaucrats deviate in their preferences from politicians and are organized in cohesive unions with strong tenure protections, they can collectively reduce effort to exert political pressure. I use data on New York Police Department (NYPD) 911 response times together with council members’ preferences on the FY2021 $1 billion cut to the NYPD’s budget. Employing difference-in-differences and spatial difference-in-discontinuities designs, I find that police reduced effort in districts of non-aligned politicians by slowing response times. This study informs the theoretical debate on principal-agent relationships in government and highlights the importance of organized political interests to explain policing in US cities.
  
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• Bureaucratic Resistance and Policy Inefficiency
  with Kun Heo
  Conditionally accepted at the American Political Science Review
  
  Abstract

  Poor public service provision creates an electoral vulnerability for incumbent politicians.Under what conditions can bureaucrats exploit this to avoid reforms they dislike? We develop a model of electoral politics in which a politician must decide whether to enact a reform of uncertain value, and a voter evaluates the incumbent’s reform based on post-reform government service quality, which anti-reform bureaucrats can undermine. Bureaucratic resistance for political leverage is most likely when voters are torn between the reform and the status quo. Resistance lowers the informational value of government service for voters and can lead to policy distortions and accountability loss. When reform is moderately popular, resistance prevents beneficial reforms due to electoral risks and induces ineffective reforms by providing bureaucrats as scapegoats. Our model identifies a distinct mechanism of bureaucratic power and its implications for policy and accountability. <br>
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      <a href="https://elisawirsching.github.io/research/bureaucraticsabotage.pdf"><div class="color-button">pdf</div></a>
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Working Papers

• Barriers to Representation: Selection Processes and Political Diversity in US Urban Bureaucracy
  2024 Best Paper Award, APSA Urban and Local Politics Section
  Abstract: A rich body of research emphasizes the importance of a representative bureaucracy for public service provision, and reveals significant gaps in the representation of partisan and racial groups in street-level bureaucracies. What drives such misrepresentation across and within agencies in professionalized local bureaucracies? Using a unique dataset that tracks the characteristics and career trajectories of over 300,000 bureaucrats in New York City, this study presents three key findings. First, there is notable sorting across agencies, with the police, fire, and sanitation departments exhibiting a strong Republican, white, and male predominance. Second, focusing specifically on recruitment at the NYPD, I find that despite minimal disparities in both representation and qualification among exam-takers, Republican and White candidates are more likely to get hired. Counterfactual analyses indicate that equalizing hiring rates across demographic groups could increase the recruitment of underrepresented groups by up to 57%. Third, once hired, Republican and White officers are also more likely to be promoted, receive more departmental awards, and enjoy longer tenures compared to their non-White and Democratic counterparts. By offering new evidence on the determinants and institutional context of bureaucratic representation, this study calls for a more nuanced understanding of how and when it impacts governance outcomes.
  
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Works in Progress

• State Coercion and the Political Mobilization of US Teachers
  with Roxanne Rahnama and Tyler Simko
  




• The Political Consequences of Police Slowdowns
  with Arvind Krishnamurthy and Dvir Yogev
  

Pre-PhD

• The Revolving Door for Political Elites: Policymakers’ Professional Background and Financial Regulation
  EBRD Working Paper
  
  pdf
  Abstract

  Regulatory capture of public policy by financial entities, especially via the revolving door between government and financial services, has increasingly become a subject of intense public scrutiny. This paper empirically analyses the relation between public-private career crossovers of high-ranking government officials and financial policy. Using curriculum vitae of more than 400 central bank governors and finance ministers from 32 OECD countries between 1973 and 2005, I compile a new dataset including details on officials’ professional careers before and after their tenure and data on financial regulation. Panel data analyses show that central bank governors with past experience in the financial sector deregulate significantly more than governors without a background in finance (career socialisation hypothesis). Using linear probability regressions, the results also indicate that finance ministers, especially from left-wing parties, are more likely to be hired by financial entities in the future if they please their future employers through deregulatory policies during their time in office (career concerns hypothesis). Thus, although the revolving door effects differ between government officials, this study shows that career paths and career concerns of policymakers should be taken into account when analysing financial policy outcomes.
  




• Daylight saving all year round? Evidence from a national experiment
  with Cagatay Bircan, Energy Economics (2023)
  
  pdf
  Abstract

  We study the effects of staying on daylight saving time (DST) permanently on electricity consumption, generation, and emissions. In October 2016, Turkey chose to stay on DST all year round. Employing alternative identification methods, we find a negligible overall impact on consumption. However, the policy has a strong intra-day distributional effect, increasing consumption in the early morning and reducing it in the late afternoon. This change in the load shape reduced generation by dirtier fossil fuel plants and increased it by cleaner renewable sources that can more easily satisfy peak load generation. Emissions from generation decreased as a result. A large presence of hydropower, which is a reliable provider of energy to the grid in peak times, was crucial to achieve this reduction.
  




• Skills, employment and automation
  with Cevat Giray Aksoy, Yvonne Giesing and Nadzeya Laurentsyeva, 2018/19 EBRD Transition Report
  
  pdf
  Abstract

  Over the past 25 years, the economies of the EBRD regions have created an average of 1.5 million jobs per year. However, the nature of work is changing, with automation on the rise. Many economies where the EBRD invests have experienced deindustrialisation, as well as the polarisation of employment – a decline in the number of medium-skilled jobs. While technological change is resulting in increased demand for skilled labour, many of these economies face significant gaps in terms of the quality of education, as well as substantial emigration by skilled workers. In the short term, the emigration of skilled workers reduces the productivity of fi rms in the country of origin. In the longer term, however, emigration has boosted the transfer of knowledge to the EBRD regions and supported innovation.