Research

My research interests are in theoretical political economy and other areas of applied theory. My main line of research introduces an approach to modeling decision making in informationally rich and complicated environments. The key novelty is to use the Brownian motion (and stochastic processes more generally) to represent the mapping from actions to outcomes. So far I have published nine papers using this technology, across a variety of applications (11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, and 27 on my C.V), and I’m actively working on several new projects (29, 30, and ongoing work). Click here to see more information on this line of work.  

I have also been developing a research agenda at the intersection of Political Economy and Industrial Organization. Political decisions set the rules of the game of market competition and, in turn, market competition determines the interests and strength of the firms who lobby policymakers over those rules. The objective of this work is to develop models that merge the forces from PE and IO and to understand how they interact. This agenda began with a pair of papers couathored with Dana Foarta and Takuo Sugaya (Econometrica, AJPS). These papers focus on dynamic interaction in complete information environments. I have written another paper with Hongyi Li that explores the interaction of market competition and political decision making under incomplete information. Understanding the intersection of PE and IO is long overdue and the area is ripe for further work. 

We hold a lunch group for people on campus interested in political economy theory. The details and schedule can be found here: Political Economy Theory Lunch

SITE conference. For the past few years I have co-organized a conference on Political Economy theory as part of the Stanford University SITE program. We see this conference as sitting at the intersection of political economy and economic theory, a venue at which political economists can gather and discuss new and interesting theory and at which economic theorists can step into political economy.  We look forward to this conference continuing annually every August. Please submit your best PE theory papers and attend the conference.