Elisa Wirsching studies the incentives and selection in US local bureaucracies and their implications for public policy and accountability. She is interested in applying causal inference methods and data science tools to identify the causes and consequences of politically motivated behavior of public service providers, particularly police. In her current research, Elisa examines how bureaucrats strategically adjust their work effort to exert pressure on elected politicians and seeks to explain why some city agencies are unrepresentative of their jurisdictions regarding partisanship, race, and gender.

Before graduate school at NYU, Elisa worked as a researcher in the Office of the Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Chair of Econometrics at the University of Mannheim, and the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. She holds an MSc in Political Science and Political Economy from the London School of Economics and a BA in Political Science and Economics from the University of Mannheim.