About

Daniel Nielson is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic expertise encompasses International Political Economy, International Organization, Comparative Political Economy, International Development, Control of Corruption, and Field Experiments. His work focuses on understanding the dynamics of international economic and political systems, with particular attention to issues related to corruption and development. As a scholar, he contributes to the academic community through research and teaching in these areas, engaging with complex questions about how political and economic institutions influence development outcomes and governance.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Public economics
• Economics
• Business
• Accounting
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Monetary economics
• Social psychology
• Economic growth
• Psychology
• Finance
• Market economy

Selected publications

• Toward Simulating Networked Societies with Formal Institutions Using AI Agents

  Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 2026-03-14

  articleOpen access

  Institutions are key to creating societies that are efficient, fair, and benevolent. Despite their importance, the complexities of human (networked) societies make it difficult to understand how formal institutions form and how they shape human communities. Artificial intelligence (AI) can potentially raise understanding in this regard. Thus, in this paper, we present a simulation model utilizing AI agents to simulate networked societies that contain formal institutions. We then observe the outputs of the resulting model under different societal conditions and formal institutions, and (where applicable) compare and contrast these outputs with political and economic theories. Our model outputs (a) address how inequality impacts societal prosperity, (b) illuminate how institutions can potentially impact poverty, and (c) give insights into the attributes of formal institutions that individuals are inclined to support. These and future simulation models can potentially inform how AI can support the design and development of institutions that facilitate healthier communities and nations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Presidential threats and bureaucrats' support for democracy in Brazil

  Policy Studies · 2025-08-21 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Experimental evidence on the financial consequences of international organization legitimacy

  The Review of International Organizations · 2025-11-05 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract International organizations (IOs) face growing resource constraints amid increasing scrutiny and legitimacy challenges from member states. In response, many IOs are seeking to diversify their funding sources by appealing to non-state actors, including individual donors. Yet, little is known about what motivates the public to contribute financially to IOs. This study investigates whether IOs’ efforts at self-legitimation influence donation behavior, distinguishing among three forms of legitimacy: (a) procedural, (b) performance-based, and (c) mandate-based. We examine the effects of legitimacy messaging on public donations to UNICEF through a series of pre-registered survey, field, and survey-based field experiments involving over 22 million Facebook users across five countries—Brazil, Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. Our findings indicate that legitimacy appeals have limited impact on individuals’ willingness or actual decisions to donate. These results suggest a need for further research into the practical implications of legitimacy in global governance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Compliance is taxing: a field experiment on tax abatement information in the United States

  Business and Politics · 2025-05-21

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract In this paper, we examine a major transparency initiative affecting tax abatements for state and local economic development in the United States that has been plagued by noncompliance. Unlike academic studies examining government compliance with transparency rules such as Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we examine government and independent auditor responses to inquiries about information already posted, or not posted, in annual financial reports. Using a pre-registered experimental approach on cities, counties, and school districts in a single large-population state (Texas), we remind entities and their external auditors of their transparency obligations as well as our ability to check their compliance with this transparency rule and ask these entities follow-up questions about their required posts. Against expectations, we found that entities were not significantly more likely to comply with our request for information when we reminded them of their disclosure obligations and we found some evidence that nudges made entities less likely to comply. We argue these results provide novel insights into the limitations of transparency initiatives.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tariffs and corporate political activity: a survey experiment on US businesses

  Business and Politics · 2025-02-20 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The trade war with China has cost US producers and consumers hundreds of billions of dollars since 2018. Yet relatively few US businesses took action to oppose it. This study reports the results of an elite survey experiment on business political activity toward trade policy. Researchers presented business managers with information about the input costs of the new tariffs to their bottom line—information that most subjects acknowledged that they lacked—and invited them to take political action to express support or opposition to these tariffs. The results suggest that the novel information on economic costs did not significantly increase managers’ propensity to contact members of Congress, donate to political campaigns, sign petitions, or join social media groups. We also found that the firm’s political culture (liberal or conservative) did not significantly influence the effectiveness of the treatment. However, descriptive analysis showed that firm political culture was strongly related to the company’s support for the trade war, suggesting that these preexisting political beliefs were resistant to new information provided in our experiment even if that information could affect the company’s bottom line.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Banking bad? A global field experiment on risk, reward, and regulation

  American Journal of Political Science · 2024-03-29 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Are banks sensitive to risk and reward in following global corporate transparency rules? Using a worldwide field experiment, this study evaluates competing predictions from expected utility, behavioralist, and institutionalist accounts. We incorporated a dozen companies around the world to make over 15,000 email solicitations asking for corporate accounts from 5000 of the world's internationally connected banks. Treatments randomize the risk profiles of different companies—by their countries’ association with corruption, terrorism, and tax evasion—and vary rewards by stating differing amounts of business revenues. The outcomes are the rates at which banks offer accounts and comply with rules on customer identification. The results suggest that banks are moderately responsive to risk—though not reward—but the magnitude of the effects is small, providing mixed evidence for conventional models and suggestive support for institutionalist accounts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Organizational Intent to Learn: Harnessing Framing for the Inflation Reduction Act

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  articleSenior author

  This study examined the effect of loss framing and social proof on small firms' learning intent about the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), focusing on green-technology tax incentives. A 2x2 factorial field experiment involving 46,843 emails to 17,083 companies showed no significant effect of these strategies on learning intent. However, insights from 14 interviews with firm representatives identified four key conceptual themes related to learning intent, barriers, and outcomes in this context. Notably, many firms were more influenced by perceived indirect benefits of the IRA, like partnerships, than by direct incentives – underscoring the limited impact of traditional framing in the climate-change context. Practically, our study serves as an information resource by providing firms with a concise 8-page IRA Executive Summary. Our results strongly indicate to climate policymakers that traditional communication strategies may fall short in invoking intent to learn. Furthermore, the study’s contributions include testing green nudges and framing in real settings and expanding organizational learning literature by investigating learning intent at the firm level. Future research will focus on the role of probabilistic and possibilistic thinking in IRA-related firm-level communications.

  PublisherDOI

• Closing the Gap between Evidence and Policy in Latin America: What Works?

  Research Square · 2024-03-21

  preprintOpen access

  <title>Abstract</title> Many governments and international organizations call for more efforts to integrate scientifically rigorous impact evaluations into policy streams, though government officials frequently self-report that they rarely engage such evidence (Newman et al. 2017; Migone and Brock 2017). Previous research has found that small “nudges” in communications content, style, or source can affect behavior in a wide variety of contexts (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). To test how nudges might impact bureaucrats’ willingness to engage with policy-relevant academic evidence, researchers sent email invitations to 130,000 public officials in Latin American countries with easily available names or contact information. This study probes engagement with a website designed to provide academic evidence in a convenient and accessible format. The study tests the effects of four treatment arms: nudges, messenger nationality, direct relevance of an example study, and saturation (the percent of bureaucrats invited from a given ministry). Results indicate that greater saturation had the strongest positive effects. Findings for messenger nationality were mixed: the Chinese researcher significantly decreased uptake generally, the Colombian appreciably increased engagement in Colombia, and the others had null effects. Motivational nudges had generally negative effects, and the relevant example made no significant difference. Broadly, these results suggest that encouraging the use of impact evidence is a difficult problem that is insensitive to most behavioral nudges but may be receptive to leveraging group dynamics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Behavioral nudges in social media ads show limited ability to encourage COVID-19 vaccination across countries

  PNAS Nexus · 2024-08-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Behavioral nudges in Facebook ads reached nearly 15 million people across six diverse countries and, consequently, many thousands took the step of navigating to governments' vaccine signup sites. However, none of the treatment ads caused significantly more vaccine signup intent than placebo uniformly across all countries. Critically, reporting the descriptive norm that 87% of people worldwide had either been vaccinated or planned vaccination-social proof-did not meaningfully increase vaccine signup intent in any country and significantly backfired in Taiwan. This result contradicts prominent prior findings. A charge to "protect lives in your family" significantly outperformed placebo in Taiwan and Turkey but saw null effects elsewhere. A message noting that vaccination significantly reduces hospitalization risk decreased signup intent in Brazil and had no significant effects in any other country. Such heterogeneity was the hallmark of the study: some messages saw significant treatment effects in some countries but failed in others. No nudge outperformed the placebo in Russia, a location of high vaccine skepticism. In all, widely touted behavioral nudges often failed to promote vaccine signup intent and appear to be moderated by cultural context.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do Indirect Taxes Bite? How Hiding Taxes Erases Accountability Demands from Citizens

  The Journal of Politics · 2023-03-14 · 28 citations

  articleSenior author

  Taxation is fundamental to citizen-government relations. Seminal accounts attribute democratization to direct taxation’s rise, and recent evidence shows that direct taxes increase citizens’ accountability demands. However, today many governments rely heavily on indirect taxes; evidence is mixed on whether they have similar effects. We present cross-national data demonstrating that indirect taxes are associated with lower levels of government accountability than direct taxes. We argue that the visibility of taxes affects their accountability consequences. We further posit that, on average, indirect taxes become less visible than direct once citizens have acclimated to higher prices. We combine lab-in-the-field experiments with survey experiments in a developing country to demonstrate that less visible taxes provoke less willingness to punish leaders politically and that established indirect taxes are not highly visible to citizens. The findings suggest that the growing reliance on indirect taxes may limit taxation’s accountability dividends and impair democratic representation.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Analyzing Development Finance Using PLAID Data

  NSF · $99k · 2005–2008

Frequent coauthors

• Michael G. Findley

  The University of Texas at Austin

  67 shared

• Mark Buntaine

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  44 shared

• Helen V. Milner

  Princeton Public Schools

  38 shared

• Jacob Skaggs

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  36 shared

• Adam S. Harris

  Brookwood Baptist Health

  26 shared

• Andries Du Plessis

  25 shared

• Jeff Marriott

  25 shared

• Sukesh Sukumaran

  Central American Technological University

  25 shared

Labs

• The Initiative For Law, Societies, and JusticePI

  The Initiative unites 70+ university affiliates to collaborate with each other, local practitioners, and policymakers to advance scientific knowledge and equity in access to justice.