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. 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, and particularly if you're interested in a project of mine that I have not yet updated this page to include!
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.
Can targeting economic sanctions at elites make sanctions more effective while reducing sanctions’ collateral costs on the broader nonelite population? This paper presents a formal model that suggests both goals are hampered when states can redistribute domestically. When sanctions target elites, those elites have an incentive to increase redistribution from nonelites to compensate themselves for their losses. Targeted sanctions are thus only more effective when domestic redistribution is costly for the sanctioned state, constraining their ability to enact these compensatory measures, and targeting is increasingly effective as these constraints become more severe. However, when domestic redistribution is costly, more targeting of elites actually makes nonelites worse off; elites’ costly redistributive responses ultimately harm nonelites more than the shifted burden of sanctions from targeting, and the enhanced efficacy of targeted sanctions encourages sending states to use them even more. Targeted sanctions thus “work” in this environment not by ensuring that elites pay the costs of those sanctions or by sparing nonelites, but by inducing economically destructive domestic policy changes that weaken the political standing of the regime, in a way that increases both the probability of regime-change and the willingness of the sanctioned state to make policy concessions. The implications of the model are explored through an examination of redistributive responses to sanctions used in Russia, Venezuela, and North Korea; redistributive responses to targeted sanctions are evident in all of these cases, but their extent and character varies depending on each state’s capacity to redistribute.
Inspired by the Stuxnet virus cyber operation and other developments in cyberwarfare, we present and analyze a formal model of clandestine distortion. Specifically, we explore a scenario where a sending state can generate uncertainty in an adversary’s understanding of their own capabilities by launching an unobserved attack that degrades the adversary’s signal of their own probability of success in achieving some policy goal that the sending state would rather they abandon - in the Stuxnet case, this was Iran’s efforts to develop a successful nuclear program. We show both that (1) clandestine distortionary attacks can successfully lead a state to abandon a policy goal by complementing overt forms of coercion (e.g. sanctions); (2) the effectiveness of this class of clandestine attack quickly degrades as the adversary becomes more confident in the sending state’s capability of launching such an attack. In the limit, clandestine distortionary attacks provide no benefit to the sending state, but the sending state needs to continue launching them despite their costs to prevent the adversary from becoming even more emboldened than they would otherwise be in pursuit of their goal. We illustrate the implications of the model through a discussion of the Stuxnet cyber operation and subsequent negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, as well as US-led “left-of-launch” operations against North Korea.
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.
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.
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.