Mentor: Marianne Bertrand

Project: Corporate influence on the rulemaking process within the United States

The rulemaking process in the United States includes an opportunity for public comment in between a new regulation and implementation of a rule change. During this comment period, not only the public at large, but corporations as well are able to exert influence over rule changes. Using textual analysis techniques, we aim to understand how this process of influence works – to what extent corporate influence affects rule changes and what kinds of changes ultimately result.

Mentor: Marianne Bertrand, Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Willard Graham Faculty Scholar, Booth School of Business

Marianne Bertrand is the Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She is a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economic Policy Research, and the Institute for the Study of Labor.

Professor Bertrand is an applied micro-economist whose research covers the fields of labor economics, corporate finance, and development economics. Her research in these areas has been published widely, including numerous research articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Finance.

Professor Bertrand is Faculty Director of Chicago Booth’s Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation and the Faculty Director of the Poverty Lab at the University of Chicago Urban Labs. Professor Bertrand also serves as co-editor of the American Economic Review.

She has received several awards and honors, including the 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize, awarded by the American Economic Association to recognize and honor outstanding research in any field of economics by a woman at the beginning of her career, and the 2012 Society of Labor Economists’ Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Labor Economics. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born in Belgium, Professor Bertrand received a Bachelor’s Degree in economics from Belgium’s Universite Libre de Bruxelles in 1991, followed by a Master’s Degree in econometrics from the same institution the next year. She moved to the United States in 1993 and earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1998. She was a faculty member in the Department of Economics at Princeton University for two years before joining Chicago Booth in 2000.