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Florencia Hnilo

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Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Breaking Ties?

In a context where RCTs are performed regularly by academics, Hnilo proposes to explore the unnoticed side effects the method might have over the population when it sorts people into treatment and control groups. This will study the behavioral responses to (i) the often impossible "blinding'' of RCTs' participants (blinding fails when subjects are aware of the experiment taking place and they understand whether they are in the control or treated group), and (ii) the potential misunderstanding of the method of treatment assignment. What if we economists are creating divisions, breaking existing social ties, when sorting people into groups?


Florencia Hnilo, Department of Economics

florencia hnilo

Florencia Hnilo is a PhD student in economics at Stanford University. Her research combines development economics, economic history, and behavioral economics to study the determinants and consequences of violence and discrimination. Prior to her studies at Stanford, she worked as a research assistant at the University of San Andrés, Argentina, and as an external research assistant for Professor Alberto Cavallo at the Harvard Business School. At the former work, Hnilo addressed new ways to detect and measure inequality using sparse principal components analysis; at the latter she studied the consequences that the trade war between the U.S. and China had on consumers wellbeing. Florencia holds a BA in economics from the University of Buenos Aires and a MA in economics from the University of San Andrés.

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