Which firms support trade liberalization and under what circumstances? The dominant approaches to trade politics ignore two key features of modern international commerce -- firm heterogeneity in export performance and ...

Why do wars happen, and what do societies fight over? Why are international relations sometimes fearful and aggressive and other times harmonious? I show that these questions can be fruitfully explored by importing some ...

Africa is rapidly urbanizing. With so many African voters now living in cities, understanding African electoral politics now requires understanding the politics of urban areas. How does urbanization affect the accountability ...

Adversarial agreements, such as the nuclear weapons treaties, disarmament zones, or conventional weapons limitations, vary considerably in the information sharing provisions they include. This dissertation investigates why ...

This dissertation provides three novel methodologies to the field of political science. In the first chapter, I describe how to make causal inferences in the face of dynamic strategies. Traditional causal inference methods ...

Making causal inferences about race is difficult because no means exist to manipulate units into treatment and control groups. Chapter 1 addresses this predicament. First, I argue that race should be defined as a composite ...

This three part dissertation begins by "Examining the Origin of Federal Reserve Independence." This paper explores early Fed history with a particular emphasis on the period between 1947 and 1953 in order to provide a ...

This collection of six essays makes novel methodological contributions to causal inference, time-series cross-sectional forecasting, and supervised text analysis. The first three essays start from the premise that while ...

Since World War II, states have negotiated a staggering number of bilateral and multilateral international agreements. Despite that fact, scholars of international relations and international law have only recently begun ...

Most empirical work focuses on the estimation of average treatment effects (ATE). In this dissertation, I argue for a different way of thinking about causal inference by estimating individual causal effects (ICEs). I ...