Nicholas Swanson

Nicholas Swanson was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center on Global Development. Prior to joining Stanford, he earned a PhD in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley in 2024.

Swanson's research interests are in development, behavioral and labor economics. His research primarily studies the causes of low firm and worker productivity in low-income countries, and in particular the extent to which this stems from labor market frictions or behavioral biases. Most of his projects are located in Burundi or Zambia.

King Center Supported Research

2024 - 2025 Academic Year | Global Development Research Funding Grant

Freeriding as a Barrier to new Product Innovation

In low and middle-income (LMIC) countries, businesses often innovate and slowly adopt new products. This is fact however is puzzling: economists have long proposed that firms operating inside the PPF should be able to more easily and less riskily adopt new products already adopted by others. In this project, we look at whether competition between firms, and limited institutions that preserve rents from experimentation, lead firms to underinvest in new products. We propose to conduct an RCT in Burundi, that offers firms in the country the opportunity to adopt a new product. We then randomize whether firms are offered i) exclusivity to adopt the product in their market or ii) are told that other competing firms will also be offered the product. We measure whether firms who are offered exclusivity are more likely to adopt the new product, and under which market conditions this is the case. We use additional randomized variation to estimate the welfare losses from limited firm experimentation.