My research interests span international political economy (IPE) and conflict, with a focus on using game theoretic models to address theoretical questions and to guide empirical investigation in these areas. Generally, my work can be divided into three broad themes/projects, two of which fall in the subfield of IPE, while the third uses approaches more common in IPE to contribute to the rationalist conflict literature. Descriptions and drafts of some of my ongoing work can be found below; please feel free to contact me if you are interested in learning more.
Political economists have provided many explanations for why governments might want to redistribute income between groups, but far fewer for why redistribution is often carried out via inefficient means. Trade protection, for instance, is often explained through its distributive consequences (who benefits from having their goods protected?), but this raises a question: why not redistribute via the tax system instead, which would increase the “size of the pie” to be distributed, such that everyone could be made better off? This project seeks to examine the myriad ways in which the value-destroying properties of trade protection inexorably change the structure of the game, applying insights that have become foundational to the rationalist conflict literature to demonstrate that inefficiency matters - not just for understanding the economics of trade, but for understanding the politics.
Amidst a backlash against globalization, many scholars have begun to ask why the compromise of "embedded liberalism" - in which the losers from greater openness are compensated - seems to have met its limitations. This paper presents a bargaining model of trade and compensation that provides an explanation. Many groups that are harmed by open trade have an incentive to lobby for protection over compensatory transfers because liberalization has dynamic effects that can reduce a group’s future political influence, such that long-term compensation is subject to a commitment problem. However, the model also demonstrates that compensating the losers can still be an effective political strategy under certain scope conditions: even short-term compensation may disrupt protectionist equilibria. Thus, this paper helps to resolve a theoretical puzzle about trade protection as an inefficient redistributive instrument while providing a new interpretation of embedded liberalism that can explain both its successes and its failures.
Trade law scholars have often argued that international institutions can serve a useful domestic political role by providing a constraint against domestic demands for protection. In this paper, I identify a new way in which such institutions and their particular features can be valuable to governments: namely, that they can provide useful information about domestic political groups. While governments are responsible for the administration of most legal trade-related actions, the information that governments need to determine which actions to pursue is often the private information of the firms and interest groups that are lobbying for these actions, and there are significant incentives for such groups to misrepresent this information. This paper uses a formal model to demonstrate that governments can use the multitude of legal options available to them to screen between domestic groups for those with the strongest cases; a selection process which can help to explain, amongst other things, why disputes pursued via the WTO have such a high rate of success (approximately 90%) and why trade remedies tend to be structured around meeting criteria instead of as "efficient breaches" requiring compensation.
The trade literature tends to conceive of the relationship between fiscal capacity and trade policy fairly simply: states that have limited fiscal capacity will be more likely to use tariffs to raise revenues given the lack of other means of doing so. This paper presents a model that complicates this story: while greater ability to tax the winners of freer trade makes freer trade more likely, greater ability to tax the losers of freer trade may actually make protectionism more likely. This follows because if both tax and trade policy choices have redistributive implications, and if they are jointly determined, then what matters most are the factors that determine the relative attractiveness of these redistributive instruments. Indeed, the model predicts that relative taxability of groups should have an even clearer relationship with trade policy than relative political power. This generates a number of empirical implications for patterns of trade policy: for instance, we would expect trade policy to be biased towards factors, industries, and firm sizes that are easier to tax. Moreover, the model provides insight into the conditions under which compensation can be used as a tool to promote freer trade: governments need to be able to tax free trade's winners in order to implement the fiscal bargains that would make trade more politically saleable.
The second project builds upon "Protection as a Commitment Problem" towards a broader exploration of the sources and implications of dynamics in trade politics, i.e. the across-time implications for trade politics if interest groups, firms, and states are forward-looking and subject to change over time in their interests and capacities. My other work in this domain looks to build microfoundations for these dynamic effects (i.e. under what conditions would we expect liberalization to reduce rather than strengthen pro-protectionist interests?) as well as to evaluate the implications of dynamics for other extant questions in the IPE literature.
A longstanding question in the international political economy literature is whether or not preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are "building blocks" or "stumbling blocks" in the larger project of building a more open world trading system. This paper presents a dynamic political economy model with three important features - heterogeneous firms, technology-based differences in comparative advantage across countries, and fixed costs to lobbying - that demonstrates that the impact of PTAs on demands for future liberalization can be conditional on the characteristics of the parties to a given PTA. In particular, while international competition leads to a within-industry shift in the distribution of firms towards larger, more productive firms, when this occurs within a PTA for countries that are otherwise at a comparative disadvantage in that industry with respect to world markets, it can actually strengthen protectionist demands by politically empowering firms who would be threatened by extra-PTA foreign competition.
The third project focuses on international conflict, taking up Putnam’s call for “two-level games” by examining domestic sources of bargaining failure in interstate conflict. While the rationalist conflict literature generally conceives of war as a result of a bargaining process between states, and thus posits sources of bargaining failure at the interstate level, this project unpacks the internal domestic conditions that can ultimately result in interstate bargaining failure.
War is commonly conceived of as the result of a bargaining process between states. However, war also has redistributive consequences within a state: certain groups face disproportionate costs (e.g. likely conscripts), while other groups may accrue most of the benefits (military contractors, politicians, etc.). War should thus be viewed simultaneously as the result of a bargaining process between domestic groups. This paper presents a two-level game in which the relative importance of different domestic groups to a government can impact the likelihood of going to war, but only under certain conditions. In particular, a necessary condition for domestic distributive politics to matter for war onset is the existence of redistributive frictions between domestic parties. This also allows the model to produce a new explanation for why war may occur despite the fact that it is Pareto inefficient: inability to costlessly redistribute value domestically between war’s beneficiaries and the beneficiaries of any peaceful bargain.
To explain costly conflict, rationalist international relations scholars have often discussed "information problems'', which are usually characterized as situations in which one or more states have perfect but private information about their capabilities, resolve, or other important conflict-relevant characteristics, but lack the incentives to honestly reveal this information to other states. However, what if a state has imperfect information about its own characteristics? This paper presents a model in which state-level agents are responsible for choosing whether to enter a conflict or not, but sub-state level actors (government agencies, private actors, etc.) have the private information that needs to be aggregated in order for states to evaluate these options correctly. If these sub-state actors have their own agendas, which may or may not align exactly with the state-level agent, this creates the possibility that intrastate misrepresentation may lead states to engage in costly conflict that they would otherwise not pursue if they were fully informed. Thus, war can sometimes be a consequence of internal information problems, rather than uncertainty about another state's characteristics.
Targeted sanctions are often thought to be more efficient than broad-based sanctions at incentivizing policy changes in rival states. This paper develops a formal model that demonstrates that this conclusion holds only conditionally - i.e. only when there exist constraints on domestic redistribution, such as limits to fiscal capacity. If a state can redistribute value between domestic groups at low cost, then targeted sanctions will simply lead to higher levels of redistribution towards the targeted groups. This conditional fungibility of costs leads to a core result: targeted sanctions should be implemented against actors with limited capacity to redistribute, while broad-based sanctions should be used against actors with abundant capacity to do so.
Some of my papers do not fit neatly into the categorization outlined above! These are listed below. They are still good papers (I think)!
Why do governments fail to adopt economic policies that are widely known to be growth-enhancing? In this paper, I develop a formal model that shows that fiscal incapacity can constrain a state's ability to implement Pareto-improving bargains supporting such policies: in other words, states that lack fiscal capacity lack the ability to redistribute income to "buy off the losers" from more efficient policies. This leads to a number of counter-intuitive implications about who benefits and who loses from increased taxation that are in stark contrast with the existing literature. In particular, while much of the literature suggests that being difficult to tax should, all else equal, be good for a group (given that the government would naturally be inclined to focus revenue collection efforts on groups that are easier to tax), I find the opposite can be true in many cases. If a group is easily taxable, governments can redistribute that group's gains to more politically important groups, which can provide a government with a stake in the economic performance of even their least preferred groups. Thus, greater ability to tax can provide an incentive to implement aggregate-income improving policies that primarily benefit these politically uninfluential groups, which can lead such groups to be better off than if they were difficult to tax. I discuss the implications of this model for a number of issue areas, including intellectual property protection, public goods provision, and ethnic discrimination. I also outline the broad implications of the argument for policy choices in the developing world, and for the development aid strategies employed by international institutions, NGOs, and states.
To explain support for protectionist policies, political economists have often assumed self-interested voters and focused on the distribution of the material effects of trade within a country. However, theories based on this approach will only apply insofar as voters' empirical beliefs about what effects result from trade correspond (on average) to the actual aggregate and distributional effects. Otherwise, even actors motivated by self-interest will support policies inconsistent with their preferences, as their choices will be based on mistaken beliefs about how those policies map to material effects. I propose a theory that engages with important aspects of work in psychology and neuroscience, wherein negative emotionally salient events receive greater attention and are thus processed more deeply, which leads to biases in voter beliefs about the effects of trade via reliance on availability heuristics. To test this theory, I have designed survey experiments which I will administer via Amazon's Mechanical Turk; in particular, I will seek to evaluate (1) if systematic biases (i.e. non-random errors) exist in the beliefs of voters with respect to international trade; (2) whether these biases in beliefs result from biases in recall; (3) whether emotions can be used to manipulate recall in ways that, in turn, lead to manipulated beliefs.