Welcome to our website. We are a group of researchers at Harvard University studying political campaign contributions made by individuals. With that goal, we are sending out personalized mailings about campaign contributions in the US. If you received a letter and have any questions about the information provided to you, or our research, please feel free to email us at admin@campaign-information.info and we will get back to you as soon as possible. The purpose of our research project is to study the implications of the public’s awareness about the open nature of campaign contributions. The ultimate goal is to understand the different mechanisms through which the open nature of this information may affect contributions. We hope that the research will shed light on the advantages and disadvantages of alternative disclosure policies, which we believe is a very important issue. This is part of a strictly academic project, and our research is not affiliated with any candidate or political party. All the information that we used in our mailings is publicly accessible through the website of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). This website includes a search tool, available at http://www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/disclosure_data_search.shtml, with which anyone can access information about individual contributions by donor name. This research team at Harvard includes Ricardo Perez-Truglia, a PhD student in Economics (rtruglia@campaign-information.info), and Dr. Guillermo Cruces (gcruces@campaign-information.info). Mr. Perez-Truglia’s primary thesis advisor is Professor Nadarajan Chetty. You may write to Ricardo Perez-Truglia directly at the above address and you may also reach his faculty thesis advisers by writing to bbady@fas.harvard.edu. All individuals who received a letter about campaign donations were randomly selected by an automated computer program from the public records of the FEC. The information provided in the letter was available from public records and was selected without regard to party affiliation. The FEC explicitly allows the use of information about individual campaign contributions for academic research such as this project. The specific activities identified as permissible by the Federal Election Commission include the use of individual contributor information for bona fide academic research projects that do not involve the sale or use of that information for a commercial purpose or for soliciting contributions (see FEC Advisory Opinion No. 1986-25). Our research project has no commercial or political objective and is in compliance with the rules regulating the use of contribution information. For more information, please see the FEC's "sale and use brochure" at http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/sale_and_use_brochure.pdf. This project was reviewed and approved in advance by Professor Chetty and by the Committee on the Use of Human Subjects in Research, a research ethics committee (also known as an “institutional review board” or “IRB”) at Harvard University. Complaints or problems concerning any research project may, and should, be reported if they arise. The Committee can be reached via email (cuhs@fas.harvard.edu) or by telephone (617-496-CUHS). If you are interested in receiving information about the results of the studies we are conducting, just send us a blank email to debriefing@campaign-information.info and we will send information about our work as soon as our studies are finished. If you have received a letter from us and would prefer that your data not be included in our analysis, you may request that your data be removed from the study by completing this form. Thank you again for your visit to this website and for your interest in our research. With best regards, Ricardo Perez-Truglia and Guillermo Cruces (the research team) PO BOX 380429, Cambridge, MA 02238 |