I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Economy and Government program, which is jointly administered by the Harvard Departments of Government and Economics and the Harvard Kennedy School. Before graduate school I worked in economic consulting and I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. My research primarily studies the international political economy of trade using formal and quantitative methods.
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BA in International Relations and Economics, 2014
University of Pennsylvania
PhD in Political Economy and Government, Expected: 2022
Harvard University
States blessed with strong economies often leverage their position for political gain using conditionality: they withhold market access from any state that does not embrace specific policies. Programs of conditionality are staggeringly diverse, varying the types of issues tied to market access, the amount of market access connected to each issue, and the degree of compliance required for access. What factors limit the number and types of political issues that can be linked to market access? Using a formal model I show how the design of conditionality is constrained by an underlying economic coercion trilemma. Programs of economic coercion can achieve at most two of the following three objectives: 1) a broad coalition of support for conditionality from multiple interest groups whose issues are linked to trade, 2) the maximum trade value possible being tied to each issue, and 3) consistent enforcement across issues. I show that states will benefit from tying multiple political issues to a single commercial volume when simultaneous noncompliance on multiple issues is unlikely. I also show how the optimal program design varies with the degree of dependence on trade. Finally, I describe how the trilemma is applied to historical and modern examples of economic coercion.
The rapid introduction of artillery to late medieval Europe initiated a massive security crisis by rendering existing urban fortifications obsolete. Instead of turning to existing networks of alliance and patronage to strengthen collective security, cities surrendered their sovereignty and agglomerated into states. How were nascent states able to consolidate authority over the formerly sovereign polities? We propose that cities had to surrender sovereignty to states because the gunpowder revolution forced them to construct new fortifications that required external financing. States were better positioned to use concentrated political authority to efficiently finance the new fortifications and coordinate inter-city security cooperation. We test the theory using detailed data on city-level urban defensive investment, the locations of artillery manufacturers, and the changing locations of national borders. We find that after the development of gunpowder technology, new defensive investments were more likely to be located in areas where borders disappeared, were built closer to politically relevant national borders, and were further from the sites of raw building materials. These findings are consistent with the theory that states arose in part as a consequence of changes in the technology of warfare.
Firms avoid paying the costs of protection in many ways – their actions lobbying against tariffs or relocating production are well known. What is the political economy of protection between opportunities to change the tariff schedule? This paper reveals another escape path through administrative lobbying to redefine products. Import-dependent firms seek lower tariffs by requesting that their products be classified into categories of the tariff schedule with lower duties. When firms substitute lobbying resources away from the determination of tariffs and towards the classification of their products, they undermine collective action because the narrow scope of the rulings delivers a private benefit to the firm. Using a unique dataset of over 200,000 classification rulings by US customs officials between 1990 and 2020, I find evidence that firms request classifications in response to rising protection. In particular, demand for classification rulings rose in response to textile quotas and President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. Classification requests are also concentrated in tariff headings that contain high variance in tariff rates. The empirical patterns suggest that firms treat lobbying over tariff levels and lobbying over tariff classification as strategic substitutes.