Topic Area Workshop
Friday, March 27 | 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM ET
New in 2025-2026: Hands-on, skills-focused sessions that go beyond lectures
and panels, but shorter and more targeted than our Short Courses.
Data Technology Topic Area:
LLMs as Research Tools: Data Annotation and Mechanism Discovery in Management Research
This presentation draws on two papers to introduce complementary applications of large language models in empirical management research. The first, Carlson and Burbano (2025, Strategic Management Journal), develops a framework for using LLMs to annotate unstructured text at scale, illustrated through classifying sustainability claims in crowdfunding campaigns. A key finding is that prompt design choices can meaningfully shift downstream research conclusions, motivating systematic sensitivity analysis as standard practice. The second, on gendered work and earnings differentials in microenterprise, uses LLMs to systematically discover candidate mechanisms driving the gender earnings gap. A four-stage pipeline — prediction, discovery, human interpretation, and validation — surfaces candidate business characteristics from World Bank survey data across 26 countries, producing dimensions that collectively explain over half the observed gap. Both applications highlight a complementary relationship between computational tools and researcher judgment: LLMs are well-suited to searching large, unstructured spaces, but evaluation, interpretation, and causal inference remain the domain of human researchers.
Dr. Natalie Carlson
Biography
Natalie A. Carlsonis an Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on entrepreneurship and human capital, with a particular focus on emerging economies. Her work draws on a variety of methodologies, with a focus on experiments and computational methods. She has worked on field experiments in collaboration with NGOs and firms in settings such as Zimbabwe and Colombia. She studied for her Ph.D. in Management at Columbia Business School, and holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale University.
