Economist studying science, innovation, production, and the media, with machine learning, causal inference, and network science. https://prashantgarg.org/papers.xml 2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z Prashant Gargprashantgargib@gmail.com https://prashantgarg.org/research/political-expression-academics 2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z Prashant Garg Thiemo Fetzer

Nature Human Behaviour · 2025. Academics have traditionally played a vital role in both the generation and dissemination of knowledge, ideas and narratives. Social media, relative to traditional media, provides for new and more direct ways of science communication. Yet, since not all academics may engage with social media, the sample that does so may have an outsize influence on shaping public perceptions of academia more broadly through at least two channels: the set topics they engage with and through the particular style a…

https://prashantgarg.org/research/local-decline-populism 2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z Prashant Garg Thiemo Fetzer Jacob Edenhofer

Economics Letters · 2025. Support for right-wing populist parties is characterised by considerable regional heterogeneity and especially concentrated in regions that have experienced economic decline. It remains unclear, however, whether the spatial externalities of local decline, including homelessness and crime, boost support for populist parties, even among those not directly affected by such decline. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap in two ways. First, we gather novel data on a particularly visible fo…

https://prashantgarg.org/research/cross-border-media-disasters 2026-06-25T13:47:57.566Z Prashant Garg Thiemo Fetzer

Nature Human Behaviour. Many natural disasters central to climate-policy debates are hydro-meteorological hazards, yet it remains unclear how global media attention is distributed across disaster types. Using a dataset of 466 news sources from 123 countries, covering 135 million news articles since 2016, we apply an event study framework to measure cross-border reporting following natural disasters. Cross-border attention rises after disasters but is highly uneven across hazards, with the largest short-run increases fo…

https://prashantgarg.org/research/ai-health-advice 2026-06-25T13:47:57.566Z Prashant Garg Thiemo Fetzer

BMJ Health & Care Informatics. Using basic health statements authorized by UK and EU registers and ~9,100 journalist-vetted public-health assertions on topics such as abortion, COVID-19 and politics from sources ranging from peer-reviewed journals and government advisories to social media and news across the political spectrum, we benchmark seven leading large language models in 21 languages. We find that, despite high accuracy on English-centric textbook claims, performance falls in multiple non-European languages and fluctu…

https://prashantgarg.org/research/global-automation-atlas 2026-06-25T13:47:57.566Z Prashant Garg Tommaso Crosta Jasmin Baier

Working paper. Automation affects the labour content of work differently across different contexts. Yet, most existing exposure measures assign fixed scores to tasks or occupations, limiting comparisons of automation exposure across countries. We develop a task-based and country-specific approach to classify automation exposure across the world to disentangle labor-substituting from labor-augmenting automation, the relevant technology channel, and the material role of AI. Our measure spans 124 countries, gener…

https://prashantgarg.org/research/causal-claims-economics 2026-06-25T13:47:57.566Z Prashant Garg Thiemo Fetzer

Working paper. As economics scales, a key bottleneck is representing what papers claim in a comparable, aggregable form. We introduce evidence-annotated claim graphs that map each paper into a directed network of standardized economic concepts (nodes) and stated relationships (edges), with each edge labeled by evidentiary basis, including whether it is supported by causal inference designs or by non-causal evidence. Using a structured multi-stage AI workflow, we construct claim graphs for 44,852 economics pape…

https://prashantgarg.org/research/what-should-economics-ask-next 2026-06-25T13:47:57.566Z Prashant Garg

Working paper. Choosing what to work on is one of the least formalized decisions in science. I study whether the local structure of past research helps screen which still-open questions are worth reading first. I build a directed literature graph from 242,595 published economics-facing papers from 1976 to 2026, rank open questions using only the literature available at each date, and test those rankings against which questions later enter published work. On realistic shortlists, graph-based screening outperfor…

https://prashantgarg.org/research/politicized-scientists 2026-06-25T13:47:57.566Z Prashant Garg Eleonora Alabrese Francesco Capozza

Working paper. As social media becomes prominent within academia, we examine its reputational costs for academics. Analyzing Twitter posts from 98,000 scientists (2016–22), we uncover substantial political expression. Online experiments with 6,000 U.S. respondents and 135 journalists, rating synthetic academic profiles with different political affiliations, reveal that politically neutral scientists are seen as the most credible. Strikingly, political expressions result in monotonic penalties: Stronger posts r…

https://prashantgarg.org/research/ai-production-networks 2026-06-25T13:47:57.566Z Prashant Garg Thiemo Fetzer Peter John Lambert Bennet Feld

Working paper. This paper leverages generative AI to build a network structure over 5,000 product nodes, where directed edges represent input-output relationships in production. We layout a two-step 'build-prune' approach using an ensemble of prompt-tuned generative AI classifications. The 'build' step provides an initial distribution of edge predictions, the 'prune' step then re-evaluates all edges. With our AI-generated Production Network (AIPNET) in toe, we document a host of shifts in the network position …

https://prashantgarg.org/research/platform-migration 2026-06-25T13:47:57.566Z Prashant Garg Dorian Quelle Frederic Denker Alexandre Bovet

Working paper. Social media platforms mediate professional communication, political expression, and community formation, making the rare instances when users collectively abandon an incumbent platform particularly consequential. Strong network effects raise switching costs and strengthen incumbents' positions, making coordinated exit difficult. Here we link 276,431 scholars on Twitter/X to their respective new profiles among the universe of all 16.7 million Bluesky accounts, tracked from January 2023 to Decemb…

https://prashantgarg.org/research/health-shocks-research 2026-06-25T13:47:57.566Z Prashant Garg Hongyu Zhou Thiemo Fetzer

Working paper. We examine whether research systems reallocate scientific effort as health needs change. We assemble a global disease-location panel for 204 countries and territories (1990-2021) by linking disease-specific publication output to disease burden in the same place and year. Using large language models, we extract diseases from article text, map them into a standardized disease classification, and classify research funders by type. Empirically, we estimate how publication output co-moves with diseas…

https://prashantgarg.org/research/mapping-dylans-mind 2026-06-25T13:47:57.566Z Prashant Garg

Aeon · arXiv. For six decades, Bob Dylan has challenged listeners with songs that reward interpretation. Critics and fans have long pored over his words, treating them as literary texts worthy of a slow, devotional reading, line by line, image by image. In 2016, Dylan even won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As the Swedish Academy put it, the prize honoured him for 'having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'. But what more might we discover if, instead of a human scholar, w…