About

Vincent Pons is the Byron Wien Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and an affiliate of the Department of Economics. His professional role involves engaging in research and teaching within the fields of economics and business administration. He is associated with Harvard Business School's Morgan Hall and also holds an affiliation at the Littauer Center in Cambridge, MA. His contact information includes a phone number and email address at Harvard Business School, as well as a secondary contact at Harvard's Department of Economics. The page indicates his involvement in academic programs, research initiatives, and faculty activities, emphasizing his role as a distinguished faculty member contributing to Harvard's economic and business education.

Research topics

• Economics
• Sociology
• Medicine
• Demographic economics
• Psychology
• Environmental health
• Engineering
• Virology
• Nursing
• Econometrics
• Demography

Selected publications

• Can a Digital Job Search Coach Reduce Unemployment? Experimental Evidence from France

  Washington, DC: World Bank eBooks · 2026-05-11

  bookOpen accessSenior author

  This paper evaluates the impact of Bob Emploi, a digital platform designed to provide personalized job search advice and coaching to the unemployed. The platform, developed by a nonprofit organization with access to France’s public employment agency data, aims to replicate traditional counseling services through automated tools. The experiment included 212,277 individuals, with 56.3 percent randomly assigned to receive encouragement to use the platform. Although our intervention increased Bob Emploi’s usage by 27 percentage points, the effects of the platform remained limited. Users made modest changes to their search methods, showed slightly higher engagement with standard employment services, and felt more supported in their search. However, the evaluation finds no impact on time spent searching, occupational scope, or job seeker well-being. Most importantly, the platform did not improve any employment outcomes over an 18-month follow-up period, with precise null effects across all subgroups. These results suggest that digital job search assistance platforms may need to combine coaching with specific job recommendations to effectively improve job seekers’ labor market outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coordination and Incumbency Advantage in Multi-Party Systems—Evidence from French Elections

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2025-01-15 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Free and fair elections should incentivize elected officials to exert effort and enable citizens to select representative politicians and occasionally replace incumbents. However, incumbency advantage and coordination failures possible in multi-party systems may jeopardize this process. We ask whether these two forces compound each other. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) in French two-round local and parliamentary elections, we find that close winners are more likely to run again and to win the next election by 33 and 25 percentage points, respectively. Incumbents who run again personalize their campaign communication more and face fewer ideologically close competitors, revealing that parties from the incumbent’s orientation coordinate more effectively than parties on the losing side. A complementary RDD shows that candidates who marginally qualify for the runoff also rally new voters. We conclude that party coordination on the incumbent and voter coordination on candidates who won or gained visibility in a previous election both contribute to incumbents’ future success.

  PublisherDOI

• Voting Rules, Turnout, and Economic Policies

  Annual Review of Economics · 2025-04-04 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the evidence on the institutional determinants and effects of voter turnout and broaden the perspective beyond the most debated rules. We begin by discussing the importance of electoral participation both for its consequences on policy choices and for democratic legitimacy. Building on a simple cost–benefit model of voting, we then review (quasi-)experimental research on the effects of voting procedures and of other election rules. Voting procedures primarily affect the cost of participation. The obstacles they create matter more when they occur ahead of the election and when the stakes are not salient, and they matter less when parties mobilize voters against them and when alternative ways to vote exist. Election rules both upstream and downstream from the election operate mostly through benefits, for instance, by affecting electoral competitiveness and the number of candidates. We conclude by highlighting questions for future research.

  PublisherDOI

• A Megastudy of Behavioral Interventions to Increase Voter Registration Ahead of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election

  2025-12-01

  articleOpen access

  In the United States, in nearly all cases, one must register in order to vote—yet, a substantial portion of the eligible electorate remains unregistered. Despite this, relatively little is known about how to increase the likelihood that a voter registers. Here, we tested the impact of 10 expert-crowdsourced, theoretically-based psychological interventions on a sample of eligible, yet unregistered, U.S. voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election (N = 12,896). Eight of the interventions increased intentions to vote, and five led individuals to click on the voter registration website. Escalating Commitment, which sequentially employed several social pressure strategies, was the strongest intervention across these outcomes. However, none of the interventions had a significant effect on actual voter registration or voter turnout. The results highlight a substantial disconnect between voters’ intentions and their ultimate behaviors. We discuss potential structural and psychological barriers that undermine the translation of intent into action.

  PublisherDOI

• Spending Limits, Public Funding, and Election Outcomes

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2025-10-02 · 2 citations

  article

  Abstract This paper investigates the effects of campaign finance rules on electoral outcomes. In French local elections, candidates competing in districts above 9,000 inhabitants face spending limits and are eligible for public reimbursement. Using an RDD around the population threshold, we find that these rules increase competitiveness and benefit the runner-up of the previous race as well as new candidates in departmental elections, while leaving the polarization of results and winners’ representativeness and quality unaffected. Incumbents are less likely to get reelected because they are less likely to run and obtain a lower vote share, conditional on running. These results appear to be driven by the reimbursement of campaign expenditures, not spending limits. We do not find such effects in municipal elections, which we attribute to higher spending, decreasing marginal returns of campaign money, and the use of a proportional list system instead of plurality voting.

  PublisherDOI

• Sources and Extent of Rising Partisan Segregation in the U.S. – Evidence from 143 Million Voters

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• A Megastudy of Behavioral Interventions to Increase Voter Registration Ahead of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election

  2025-12-01

  articleOpen access

  In the United States, in nearly all cases, one must register in order to vote—yet, a substantial portion of the eligible electorate remains unregistered. Despite this, relatively little is known about how to increase the likelihood that a voter registers. Here, we tested the impact of 10 expert-crowdsourced, theoretically-based psychological interventions on a sample of eligible, yet unregistered, U.S. voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election (N = 12,896). Eight of the interventions increased intentions to vote, and five led individuals to click on the voter registration website. Escalating Commitment, which sequentially employed several social pressure strategies, was the strongest intervention across these outcomes. However, none of the interventions had a significant effect on actual voter registration or voter turnout. The results highlight a substantial disconnect between voters’ intentions and their ultimate behaviors. We discuss potential structural and psychological barriers that undermine the translation of intent into action.

  PublisherDOI

• Sources and Extent of Rising Partisan Segregation in the U.S. – Evidence from 143 Million Voters

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access

  Using two datasets tracking the location and party affiliation of every U.S. voter between 2008 and 2020 in states recording partisan registration, we find that geographic segregation between Democrats and Republicans has increased year over year at all geographic levels, from Congressional Districts to Census Blocks.Areas trending Democratic have a starkly different demographic profile than those trending Republican, so the confluence of demographics, partisanship, and geography is growing.We decompose the increase in geographic partisan segregation into different sources and show that it has not been driven primarily by residential mobility but rather by generational turnover, as new voters entering the electorate cause some places to become more homogeneously Democratic, and by party switching, as existing voters leaving the Democratic party cause other places to become more Republican.The groups that most contribute to the rise in partisan segregation are young people, women, and non-white voters in Democratic-trending areas; and white and older voters in Republican-trending areas.

  PublisherDOI

• Keep Your Enemies Closer: Strategic Platform Adjustments during US and French Elections

  American Economic Review · 2025-07-31 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  We study changes in political discourse during campaigns, using a novel dataset of candidate websites for US House elections, 2002–2016, and manifestos for French parliamentary and local elections, 1958–2022. We find that candidates move to the center in ideology and rhetorical complexity between the first round (or primary) and the second round (or general election). This convergence reflects candidates’ strategic adjustment to their opponents, as predicted by Downsian competition: Using an RDD we show that candidates converge to the platform of opponents who narrowly qualified for the last round as opposed to those who narrowly failed to qualify. (JEL D72, D83, D91)

  PublisherDOI

• Electoral Turnovers

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2024-11-08 · 8 citations

  article

  Abstract In most national elections, voters face a key choice between continuity and change. Electoral turnovers occur when the incumbent candidate or party fails to win reelection. To understand how turnovers affect national outcomes, we study all presidential and parliamentary elections held globally between 1946 and 2018. We document the prevalence of turnovers over time and estimate their effects on economic performance, human development, and the quality of democracy. Using a close-elections regression discontinuity design across countries, we show that turnovers improve several measures of country performance. To explain these positive effects, we explore how electoral turnovers affect leader characteristics, shape policy decisions, reduce perceived corruption, and foster accountability.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Vincenzo Galasso

  Bocconi University

  68 shared

• Martial Foucault

  Columbia University

  68 shared

• Sylvain Brouard

  60 shared

• Clémence Tricaud

  University of California, Los Angeles

  56 shared

• Michael Becher

  Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris

  53 shared

• Esther Duflo

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  52 shared

• Riako Granzier

  Uber AI (United States)

  50 shared

• William Parienté

  49 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  2007

• M.A., Economics

  Harvard University

  2003

• B.A., Economics

  Harvard University

  2001