Country: United States
Case Study
Tertius – An online construction marketplace that easily connects property developers with…
Tertius has resulted in massive productivity gains for the building industry in DC, enabling developers & property owners to book (at a nominal cost) certified third party agency inspections. Outcome: Far more efficient matching of demand & supply for permit inspections, substantially reducing turnaround times. Tertius has driven revenue to the taxpayers, increased regulatory oversight, increased safety in the building community, saving property owners and developers thousands of dollars.
The City of Seattle spends over $720 million every year. With the surge of COVID-19, small businesses were left in a highly vulnerable position, forcing many to shut down. This is especially true for women and minority-owned small businesses (WMBEs). We worked with the City to launch its e-commerce government marketplace, providing a platform for government buyers to seamlessly find local WMBEs, access their products and services, obtain quotes, and check out with a few clicks.
BI Project
Levelling the playing field in police recruitment: Evidence from a field experiment on test…
How to increase diversity in the police is an unanswered question that has received significant political and media attention. One area of intervention is the recruitment process itself. This study reports the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in a police force that was experiencing a disproportionate drop in minority applicants during one particular test. Drawing on insights from the literatures on stereotype threat, belonging uncertainty and values affirmation exercises, we…
BI Project
More Than Public Service: A Field Experiment on Job Advertisements and Diversity in the Police
There is a human capital crisis looming in the public sector as fewer and fewer people show interest in government jobs. At the same time, many public sector organizations struggle with increasing the diversity of their workforce. Although many institutional forces contribute to the challenge, part of the solution is in how government recruits. This study presents the results of a field experiment aimed at attracting more and different people to apply to a police force by varying job…
Government agencies around the world struggle to retain frontline workers, as high job demands and low job resources contribute to persistently high rates of employee burnout. Although four decades of research have documented the predictors and potential costs of frontline worker burnout, we have limited causal evidence on strategies that reduce it. In this article, we report on a multicity field experiment (n = 536) aimed at increasing perceived social support and affirming belonging among 911…
The hard-fought gains of democratization have come under attack in many countries. To reverse this trend, policymakers and civil society need new tools to navigate sophisticated forms of democratic erosion. We combine recent advances in machine learning with massive webscraping to produce high-frequency data and forecasts predicting where democratic backsliding will occur and the specific forms it will take. We equip pro-democracy forces with advanced warning to guide more strategic responses.
Since 2020, the City of Austin (COA) and the University of Texas (UT) have collaborated on over twenty diverse research projects under the legal and administrative framework of a five-year, ten million dollar master interlocal agreement (ILA). Among a very few of its kind in the USA, this ILA is an "innovation enabling innovation" that bridges the barriers between two large, extremely complex organizations and fast-tracks the launch of research and innovation projects by four to five times.