PUBLISHED ARTICLES:

Rising Inequality as a Threat to the Liberal International Order , International Organization (2021)

(with Ronald Rogowski).

Enduring the Great Recession: Economic Integration in the European Union , The Review of International Organizations (2021)

(with Lauren Peritz, Ryan Weldzius, and Ronald Rogowski).

Global capital markets, housing prices, and partisan fiscal policies , Economics & Politics (2018) 

(with Ben W. Ansell and J. Lawrence Broz).

WORKING PAPERS:

An Economic Geography Model of Tariff Attitudes: Evidence from the Mexico Peso Shock (2023), SSRN Working Paper  (under review). 

Abstract: This paper develops an economic geography model of individual tariff policy preferences. In contrast to the standard models that emphasize class or industry conflict, I predict geographic political cleavages.  When imports harm local manufacturing, self-interest induces nearby residents with heterogeneous industries and skills to support tariff protections. I test this with an original dataset of an exogenous trade shock from Mexico following the 1994 Peso Crisis. Contrary to existing models, US employment losses and financial pain spread from manufacturing to non-manufacturing industries, and from low to high skill voters, within local economies. These economic spillovers created geographic divisions in trade policy attitudes and persistent support for the anti-trade populist Ross Perot between the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. Geographic cleavages cut across pre-existing divisions based on industry, class, gender, race, and partisanship. This significantly advances knowledge of trade policy’s (local) economic roots as well as American opposition to Mexican imports.  

How Populism Persists: Internal Migration and Economic Shocks  (2025) SSRN Working Paper.

Abstract: Why does populism sometimes persist across time and space? I argue that economic shocks generate lasting political pressures favoring populists only where residents face high barriers to emigration. In contrast, depressed regions with greater mobility recover economically and politically. I introduce original measures of internal migration using address changes in IRS tax returns and regional variation in housing relocation costs. Exploiting the 1994 Peso Crisis as an exogenous trade shock to U.S. local economies, I show that trade exposure lastingly increased populist vote shares from 1996 to 2016—but only where emigration was constrained. Limited emigration due to housing affordability was especially linked to enduring populism, while areas with more mobile populations experienced faster employment and wage recovery and a shorter-lived backlash. Placebo tests rule out compositional effects of emigration. These findings identify migration barriers as a key intensifier of globalization’s electoral effects and help explain the often durable geographic roots of populist movements.

Protectionism for Him, Welfare for Her: The Trade Origins of Gendered Political Cleavages   (2025) SSRN Working Paper.

(with Soohyun Cho, Bowdoin College)

Abstract: What explains gendered political cleavages over globalization? Although earlier work suggests that women support trade barriers more than men, recent populist movements reveal the opposite. We develop a theory that incorporates family economic structures into the specific factors model of trade preferences, showing how traditional gender roles reshape the distributional effects of economic policies: male family members benefit more from protectionism while female members benefit more from welfare compensation. We test this by tracking how exogenous trade shocks propagate through families to affect survey respondents’ policy preferences. When respondents’ family members suffer increased import competition, males significantly turn to trade and migration restrictions while females turn to family-oriented welfare policies. These indirect family effects also shape electoral behaviors, fueling male support for populists and decreasing female participation in elections. The findings underscore the importance of moving beyond individual voter characteristics to understand fully gendered political cleavages over economic policy.

Commerce and Campaigns: The Local Roots of Globalization Messaging in US Presidential Speeches  (2025) SSRN Working Paper.

Abstract: Why has trade and immigration policy risen to the top of the national agenda? A heated debate between voter- and elite-driven theories continues in large part due to limited data on elite behavior. We introduce an original dataset covering the universe of campaign speeches by presidential candidates from 2008 to 2024, which we geocode and analyze with semi-supervised text methods to quantify where presidential campaigns emphasize trade and migration policy. We develop a general theory to predict conditions under which globalization policy is a voter- or elite-driven process. We find supportive evidence that intense party competition incentivizes campaigns to tailor their trade and immigration agendas to fit local industry interests.  Absent party competition, campaigns become unresponsive to local interests by ignoring trade and priming immigration content despite no measurable migrant impacts. These results are robust to exogenous sources of local interests, campaign spatial and temporal dynamics, placebo tests, and are not specific party or the post-2016 era. The paper reconciles voter-driven and elite-priming theories by revealing an important but narrow set of conditions under which campaigns are responsive to local interests over the global economy.

Micro-Spatial Inequality and Redistribution: Evidence from the California Millionaires Tax Propositions  (2022) Working Paper.

Abstract: Why democracies fail to redistribute income in response to rising inequality remains a significant puzzle in political economy. I argue that voters' demand for redistribution responds chiefly to locally visible changes in housing wealth inequality. In contrast to the national income distribution, changes in housing wealth within local economies are both highly visible and relevant to voters' pocketbooks. To measure ``locally visible inequality,'' I create a new dataset of Gini indices---of both housing value and income inequality---at different levels of geographic aggregation starting from neighborhood Census tracts up to small metropolitan areas. To address endogeneity concerns, I pair this measure with an analysis of changes in Census tract vote shares for California's ``Millionaires Tax,'' a ballot initiative that was approved by voters in 2012 and 2016. The resulting differences-in-differences analysis reveals that within-tract increases in housing wealth inequality (but not in income inequality) caused pro-redistribution vote shares to increase over time. Additionally, this effect decays as the source of inequality occurs farther away. These results suggest that the local economy significantly constrains public support for redistribution.

SELECTED WORKS IN PROGRESS:

Estimating Local Area Public Opinion on Trade and Immigration Policies

(with Saliha Garcia, PhD Student, Texas A&M University) 

Firm Influence in the Era of Rising Trade Barriers: Evidence from the US-China Trade War

(with Zoe Xincheng Ge, IE University)