Zach Freitas-Groff

Bio

Zach Freitas-Groff is an AI Program Officer at Longview Philanthropy, where he conducts grant investigations focused on artificial intelligence, digital sentience, and EU AI governance. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University (2018 cohort), where his research spanned public economics, political economy, and behavioral and experimental economics, advised by B. Douglas Bernheim, Matthew Gentzkow, Caroline Hoxby, and Ran Abramitzky. His dissertation work produced a systematic empirical investigation of policy persistence, tracking over 800 policies subject to close U.S. state referendums since 1900 and finding that passing a referendum increases the probability a policy remains operative 20 to 100 years later by over 40 percentage points. He is also a Research Affiliate at the Population Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin, and has previously worked as a Research Analyst at Innovations for Poverty Action and as a researcher at the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University. His research has been covered by The New York Times, Reuters, Marginal Revolution, and Vox. He received an early LTFF grant to fund research assistance gathering data on the persistence, expansion, and reversal of laws over five-plus decades, work that later formed part of his dissertation.

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Last Updated

Mar 23, 2026, 2:02 AM UTC

Created

Mar 20, 2026, 3:00 AM UTC