Jiaen Wu

About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Public Affairs at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Bloomington. I am on the 2026–27 academic job market.

CV (PDF) · Job Market Paper · Google Scholar · jiaewu@iu.edu

My first name is pronounced JIA-en, like “giant” without the “t.”

I study how public organizations allocate discretion, and what happens when that allocation shifts. My work sits at the intersection of bureaucratic discretion, representative bureaucracy, and algorithmic governance. Whether the change comes from a diversity mandate, a predictive risk score, or an unexpected policy shock, I ask how new decision environments reshape the choices of managers and frontline workers, and with what consequences for the equity and efficiency of public services. Because these questions are causal at their core, I rely on quasi-experimental designs and large administrative datasets.

My dissertation, Balancing Bureaucratic Discretion: The Role of Diversity, Policy, and AI in Public Governance, pursues these questions across three settings: workforce diversity interventions, federal contracting, and algorithmic screening in child protective services. My job market paper, “Routinized Deference: Predictive Screening and Bureaucratic Capacity in Child Protective Services” (invited to revise and resubmit at JPART), shows that when child protection agencies adopt predictive screening tools, caseworkers come to defer to the algorithm: substantiation rates fall, investigations slow, and analytical capacity erodes rather than expands.

I am extending this agenda as principal investigator on a randomized field experiment supported by a Schmidt Sciences AI at Work Grant. Working with Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue, the project tests whether AI training raises frontline officers’ analytical capacity and shifts enforcement from small-taxpayer audits toward investigations of large firms. I am an Irsay Graduate Fellow at Indiana University Bloomington and a recipient of the Staats Emerging Scholars Award from the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA).

Before beginning my Ph.D., I earned an M.S. in Public Policy and a B.S. in Political Science from National Taiwan University.