Elliott Serna

Policy student at Cornell University. Nerd for econometrics, computational social science, political economy, and bureaucracy. Interested in the quant end of policy research.

Elliott Serna

Featured Skills

Recent Work

The People Lab @ Harvard Kennedy School

Undergraduate Research Fellow at The People Lab under Dr. Elizabeth Linos, conducting applied public administration research focused on evidence-based policymaking, public management, and behavioral science.

Judgment & Decision-Making Research @ Cornell

Research assistant to Dr. Jan Voelkel studying judgment and decision-making in politically polarized contexts. Studying mechanisms for behavior change across policy contexts.

Econometrics & Statistical Decision Theory Lab @ Cornell Economics

Research assistant on the multi-year project "(Mostly Harmless) Statistical Decision Theory" under Professors Jörg Stoye, Chen Qiu, and Jose Luis Montiel Olea. Leveraging econometrics to develop better tools for estimation in policy research.

American Economic Association — Office of the Data Editor

Senior Research Assistant under Dr. Lars Vilhuber, processing replication packages submitted to AEA journals and auditing data and code for reproducibility prior to publication across nine journals.

Cornell Policy Group

Former Co-President and Director of the Center for Domestic Policy, current Research Principal and Founder of the Applied Policy Lab @ Cornell Policy Group, Cornell's first student-run computational social science lab.

Housing Research for Maine People's Alliance

Research assistant for Dr. Jamila Michener, Senior Associate Dean at the Brooks School, in partnership with Maine People's Alliance. Studied "what works" for affordable housing.

Office of Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes

District office intern for California State Assemblymember and California Latino Legislative Caucus chair, Hon. Sabrina Cervantes (AD58).

Future Caucus

Policy intern with Future Caucus, a DC-based non-profit supporting Millennial and Gen-Z lawmakers.

Publications

Measuring Legislative Corruption in Czechia

A generalized synthetic control approach with ML-assisted covariate selection. (In preparation)

Expanding High-Speed Rail in the Northeast to Reduce U.S. Carbon Emissions

Cornell Policy Group Journal of Affairs, 1(20), 19–22. (2023)

Establishing Public Campaign Support Programs to Diversify State Legislatures

Cornell Policy Group Journal of Affairs, 1(21), 24–26. (2024)

'Missing Middle Housing' Wasn't Always Missing. It's Time We Bring It Back.

Cornell Policy Group. (2024)