Shashank Singh

PhD Student

I am a PhD student at The Walter A. Haas School of Business (U.C. Berkeley). My research interests are broad, and span across Political Economy, Regulation and Applied ML/DL. My prior work has explored NLP techniques to study judicial institutions and judges.

Previously, I was a Pre-Doctoral Research Professional at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, advised by Prof. Luigi Zingales at the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.

I completed my Integrated B.S. and M.S. from IIT Kharagpur, majoring in Economics with a Minor in Mathematics and Computing and a Micro-Specialization in Artificial Intelligence and Applications.

During my undergraduate studies I was a part-time RA at the World Bank, where I was advised by Prof. Daniel Li Chen and Prof. Shareen Joshi.

Here is my CV.

selected research

Working Paper

The Conflict-of-Interest Discount in the Marketplace of Ideas

John Barrios, Filippo Lancieri, Joshua Levy, Shashank Singh, Tommaso Valletti, and Luigi Zingales

2025

Working Paper

Abs HTML

We conduct a survey of economists and a representative sample of Americans to infer the reduction in the perceived value of a paper when its authors have conflicts of interest (CoI), i.e., they have financial, professional, or ideological stakes in the outcome of the results. On average, a CoI decreases trust in the conclusions of an economics paper by 30%. This reduction in trust reflects a combination of the frequency of conflicted papers and the bias of papers when they are conflicted. To isolate the second term, we introduce a key construct: the CoI Discount, which measures the reduction in the value of a conflicted paper relative to a nonconflicted one. We show that, on average, conflicted papers are worth less than half of non-conflicted ones, though this effect varies significantly depending on the nature of the conflict. The discount is more pronounced when the conflict involves the interest of a private rather than a public entity. Restricted data access also leads to a substantial discount. We validate our survey based estimates by comparing them to actual biases observed in conflicted papers within the economics and medical literature.