Zach Freitas-Groff

Welcome! I am a Senior Programme Associate at Longview Philanthropy and a Research Affiliate at the Population Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin.

I recently completed my Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University, where I studied public economics, political economy, and behavioral/experimental economics. I have interests in the impacts of policies on future generations, animal welfare, and artificial intelligence.

zachary.freitasgroff@austin.utexas.edu | 579 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305-6072

Working Papers

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Policy choices sometimes appear stubbornly persistent, even when they become politically unpopular or economically damaging. This paper offers the first systematic empirical investigation of how persistent policy choices are, defined as whether an electorate’s or legislature’s decisions affect whether a policy is in place decades later. I create a new dataset that tracks the historical record of more than 800 policies that were the subjects of close U.S. state referendums since 1900. In a regression discontinuity design, I estimate that passing a referendum increases the chance a corresponding policy is operative 20, 40, or even 100 years later by over 40 percentage points. I collect additional data on U.S. Congressional legislation and international referendums and use existing data on state legislation to document similar policy persistence for a range of institutional environments, cultures, and topics. I develop a theoretical model to distinguish between possible causes of persistence, and I present evidence that persistence arises because of how rarely policies overcome procedural barriers to reform. Calibrating my model suggests that many policies remain in place—or not—regardless of popular support.
  • with Ben Grodeck, Oliver Hauser, and Johannes Lohse
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    PDF
  • with B. Douglas Bernheim, Nina Buchmann, Sebastián Otero
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    Stanford Institute for EconomicPolicy Research (SIEPR) Working Paper
with Carl Meyer and Trevor Woolley
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Kilts Center at Chicago Booth Marketing Data Center Paper

Work in Progress

  • with Karan Makkar
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    Slides
  • with Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, and Tony Fan
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    Slides

Publications