The PDEL Research Community

UC San Diego has been a pioneer in thinking about incentives and designs for market institutions and for local, national, and international governance, which are central to policy design and evaluation.

PDEL comprises a large faculty cluster of new empiricists, skilled in the building blocks of rigorous research: 1) social science lab experiments; 2) field experiments; and 3) natural experiments. True to the spirit of UC San Diego, PDEL leverages the campus’ strength in science and technology to find and then to evaluate novel solutions to pressing global problems, providing a deeper understanding of the consequences of interventions in education, public heath, elections and governance, and environmental, tax, and trade and immigration policy.