Daniel Nielson is Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a co-founder and Chief Research Officer at Evaluasi, a consulting firm specializing in randomized evaluation. He is also Executive Director of Research at UT-Austin’s Innovations for Peace and Development. He is Director of Graduate Studies in UT-Austin’s Government Department. He holds a courtesy appointment at UT-Austin’s McCombs School of Business. He is Professor Emeritus of political science at Brigham Young University. In 2018 he was a visiting research fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance.
He is a co-founder and former Chief Social Scientist of AidData. He is also co-founder and former Director of the Global Politics Lab at Brigham Young University. He received his PhD in international affairs from University of California – San Diego in 1997. He has also been a visiting scholar at Duke University’s Political Science Department, the Government Department at the College of William and Mary, and the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico. He has been a principal investigator on major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and USAID. He has also served as a consultant for the World Bank and UNICEF.
His research focuses on international development, foreign aid, the control of corruption, and international organization. He specializes in the use of transnational field experiments to learn about causal effects in political economy. He is co-author of Global Shell Games: Experiments in Transnational Relations, Crime, and Terrorism (Cambridge University Press 2014) and co-editor of Delegation and Agency in International Organizations (Cambridge 2006). He has also authored and co-authored articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Science Advances, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Strategic Management Journal, among other journals.
You can view his Curriculum Vitae here.
You can view his Google Scholar profile here.
