About

Sylvain Chassang is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University, based in the Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building in Princeton, NJ. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). His professional profile indicates a focus on economic research, although specific details about his research areas, background, or key contributions are not provided in the available page text.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Econometrics
• Statistics
• Mathematics
• Marketing
• Psychology
• Industrial organization
• Medicine
• Business
• Management science

Selected publications

• Scoring and Cartel Discipline in Procurement Auctions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• G²LM|LIC - Whistleblowing and Worker Wellbeing: Evidence from Bangladesh’s Garments Sector

  2025-03-18

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In many developing countries, the private sector lacks monitoring systems to provide firms with incentives for good behavior. In part, this problem is due to weak, sometimes corrupt state institutions (Dal Bó and Finan, 2016). In part, it may also be due to principal-agent problems within the firm and to limited organizational capacity (Bloom et al., 2014; Boudreau, 2019). In principle, external whistleblowing systems (e.g., implemented by regulatory agencies) could support employees to inform state or other entities about employer misconduct. But while theoretical literatures on principal-agent-monitor problems and on secure survey design generate predictions on how the design and implementation of whistleblowing systems affect information transmission and misbehavior (Chassang and Padró i Miquel, 2018; Chassang and Zehnder, 2019), Little is known about how these predictions perform in practice. In the proposed research, the research team study how the design and the introduction of a whistleblowing system affects information transmission by employees, misconduct by firm owners or by managers, and ultimately workers’ wellbeing and relations with management. Our setting is Bangladesh’s garments sector, where weak state institutions offer little to no legal protections to whistleblowers. In response, multinational apparel buyers introduced their own whistleblowing system in the form of an anonymous, toll-free helpline managed by a reliable third-party. They collaborate with the helpline, named Amader Kotha (AK), or “our voice” in Bangla, to implement a field experiment. Theytest how varying the resolution protocol affects workers’ incentives to report, the actual incidence of labor issues, and workers’ wellbeing and relations with management. They hypothesize that lack of plausible deniability and coordination problems lead employees to underreport certain types of employer misbehavior. Further, the study hypothesizes that women, who comprise the majority of workers in this setting, are both more subject to mistreatment by their largely male managers and face higher costs of reporting. The project team will conduct a field experiment with 158 garments factories that participate in the AK Helpline. They will randomly assign half of these factories to treatment and half to control and compare their outcomesat baseline and 9 months after the intervention. Factories that are treated will experience a change in the AK Helpline’s resolution system, namely, an increase plausible deniability for callers and/or a reduction in coordination problems among workers by providing an information escrow2. The control condition is the status quo AK Helpline resolution system. They will test for effects on four main outcomes: (1) worker incentives to report sensitive issues, (2) actual occurrence of labor issues, (3) worker wellbeing, and (4) worker-manager relations. In addition, The team will explore potential effects on collective action by workers3. They will test for heterogeneous treatment effects on these outcomes by gender. To measure these outcomes, they will use a combination of individual survey data, helpline call data, as well as an anonymous voting system to get at the actual incidence of employer misbehavior. Our research contributes to three main strands of literature: A growing literature on labor standards and economic development, and in particular, their interaction with global trade; an extensive theoretical literature on contract theory and collusion in organizations, and specifically in relation to the design of whistleblowing mechanisms; and to literature advancing the design of survey instruments to elicit sensitive behaviors. This project provides, to our knowledge, with the first field-based experimental evidence on the design of whistleblowing mechanisms under fear of retaliation. The project team is also the first to study the incidence of harassment at the workplace in a randomized controlled trial. This research is highly policy-relevant. There is a great deal of interest among policymakers and multinational buyers in how to design whistleblowing and grievance resolution systems to provide employers and their managers with incentives for good behavior. This research also responds to interest in gender equality, highlighting the role of internal reporting and grievance mechanism to improve conditions for women at the workplace. This research is part of a research agenda on labor conditions and productivity in developing countries (Boudreau et al, 2019, Boudreau 2019) and information mechanisms in affecting development outcomes (González-Torres, 2019). Our research team’s ability to partner with critical stakeholders in the global apparel supply chain, such as the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety (a coalition of multinational buyers that formed in the aftermath of the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh to improve their suppliers’ safety), is possible, demonstrates stakeholders’...

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Generous Long-Term Contracts

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Valuing the Time of the Self-Employed

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2025-01-07 · 2 citations

  article

  Abstract People’s value of their own time is a key input in public policy evaluations—these evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Measuring this value for the self-employed is challenging, as, by definition, it is not priced by the market. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive preferences. As a result, neither market wages nor standard valuation techniques correctly measure participants’ value of time. Using a structural model, we identify the behavioural wedges in participants’ choices and find that distortions appear when households exchange cash either for time or for goods. Our model estimates suggest that valuing the time of the self-employed at 60% of the market wage is a reasonable rule of thumb.

  PublisherDOI

• Scoring and Cartel Discipline in Procurement Auctions

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-04-01

  reportOpen access

  Auctioneers suspecting bidder collusion often lack the formal evidence needed for legal recourse.A practical alternative is to design auctions that hinder collusion.Since Abreu et al. (1986), economic theory has emphasized imperfect monitoring as a constraint on collusion, but evidence remains scarce on whether: (i) information frictions meaningfully limit real-world collusion; and (ii) auctioneers can effectively exploit these frictions.Indeed, transparency concerns often prevent the introduction of explicit randomness in auction design.We make progress on this issue by studying the impact of subjective scoring in auctions run by Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transportation.The adoption of scoring auctions significantly reduced winning bids in ways inconsistent with competition.Model-based inference suggests that the cartel's dynamic obedience constraints were binding and were tightened by imperfect monitoring.Subjective scoring can successfully leverage imperfect monitoring frictions to reduce the scope of collusion.

  PublisherDOI

• Secure Survey Design in Organizations: Theory and Experiments

  American Economic Journal Microeconomics · 2024-10-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We study secure survey designs in organizational settings where fear of retaliation makes it hard to elicit truth. Theory predicts that (i) randomized-response techniques offer no improvement because they are strategically equivalent to direct elicitation, (ii) exogenously distorting survey responses (hard garbling) can improve information transmission, and (iii) the impact of survey design on reporting can be estimated in equilibrium. Laboratory experiments confirm that hard garbling outperforms direct elicitation but randomized response works better than expected. False accusations slightly but persistently bias treatment effect estimates. Additional experiments reveal that play converges to equilibrium if learning from others’ experience is possible. (JEL C83, C90, D83, D91)

  PublisherDOI

• Using Divide-and-Conquer to Improve Tax Collection

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2024-06-26 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Tax collection with limited enforcement capacity may be consistent with both high- and low-delinquency regimes: high delinquency reduces the effectiveness of threats, thereby reinforcing high delinquency. We explore the practical challenges of unraveling the high-delinquency equilibrium using a mechanism design insight known as divide-and-conquer. Our preferred mechanism takes the form of prioritized iterative enforcement (PIE). Taxpayers are ranked using the ratio of expected collection to capacity use. Collection threats are issued in small batches to ensure high credibility and induce high compliance. Following repayments, liberated capacity is used to issue the next round of threats. In collaboration with a district of Lima, we experimentally assess PIE in a sample of 13,432 property taxpayers. The data validate and refine our theoretical framework. A semi-structural model suggests that keeping collection actions fixed, PIE would increase tax revenue by roughly 10%.

  PublisherDOI

• Monitoring Harassment in Organizations

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-03-01 · 13 citations

  report

  We evaluate secure survey methods designed for the ongoing monitoring of harassment in organizations. We use the resulting data to answer policy relevant questions about the nature of harassment: How prevalent is it? What share of managers is responsible for the misbehavior? How isolated are its victims? To do so, we partner with a large Bangladeshi garment manufacturer to experiment with different designs of phone-based worker surveys. Garbling responses to sensitive questions by automatically recording a random subset as complaints increases reporting of physical harassment by 288%, sexual harassment by 269%, and threatening behavior by 46%. A rapport-building treatment has an insignificant aggregate effect, but may affect men and women differently. Removing team identifiers from survey responses does not significantly increase reporting and prevents the computation of policy-relevant team-level statistics. The resulting data shows that harassment is widespread, that the problem is not restricted to a minority of managers, and that victims are often isolated in teams.

  PublisherDOI

• Regulating Collusion

  Annual Review of Economics · 2023-03-27 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We attempt to provide a systemic view of the process of regulating collusion, including detection and prosecution as well as bargaining between firms and regulators via consent orders, the production of evidence, and containment measures that may be taken if collusion cannot be addressed with more direct means. In addition, we try to do justice to the peculiarities of the legal system: Modeling the courts as they are, rather than as economists think they should be, is essential for economic analysis to improve the way collusion is regulated.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Regulating Collusion

  CrimRxiv · 2023-10-03

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Erik Snowberg

  University of Utah

  122 shared

• Gerard Padró i Miquel

  Yale University

  104 shared

• Christian Zehnder

  41 shared

• Abhijit Banerjee

  24 shared

• Juan Ortner

  18 shared

• Kei Kawai

  University of California, Berkeley

  11 shared

• Vianney Perchet

  10 shared

• Jun Nakabayashi

  9 shared