Andy Eggers is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Government Department and an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. His academic research focuses on electoral rules, politicians' personal finances, and research methodology (particularly causal inference). He is also interested in text analysis algorithms, and since the beginning of 2009 he has worked on an interdisciplinary project analyzing political speech in Congress and the MediaCloud database. All of his work blends creative data collection and careful research design to shed light on questions about the functioning of democracy.
Andy has an enduring interest in the use of the web to broaden government and corporate transparency, having conducted research on these issues at the Brookings Institution before coming to Harvard. During graduate school he founded and directed ProxyDemocracy.org, which gathers data on institutional investors' proxy votes from SEC filings and various websites and publishes them in a searchable database. In 2008 he was recognized for this work by Yale's Milstein Center as a "Rising Star of Corporate Governance."
Since 2007 Andy has been the authors' committee chair of the IQSS Social Science Statistics Blog. He holds an MA in economics from Tufts University and an AB in history (summa cum laude) from Harvard College.