About

I am an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. I was previously an associate professor of political science at the University of Washington and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton. I study the political economy of technology, innovation, and public policy.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economics
• Law
• Political economy
• Demographic economics
• Economic system
• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Demography
• Public administration
• Market economy
• Development economics
• Medicine
• Economic growth
• Economy
• Environmental health
• Labour economics
• Geography
• Mathematics
• Finance

Selected publications

• Old money: Campaign finance and gerontocracy in the United States

  Journal of Public Economics · 2025-07-31 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Intersectional or Inseparable? Connecting Theory to Estimands in Studies of Identity 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mobilizing Frontline Workers Against Wage Theft

  Labor Studies Journal · 2025-03-02 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  We use an original survey of frontline U.S. workers in five low-wage industries to investigate the prevalence of perceived wage theft and the effectiveness of messages aimed at mobilizing in response. We find that over 14% of workers report recent incidents of late- or underpayment. These workers are both more supportive of union representation and more willing to search for a new job. Using an embedded survey experiment, we study workers’ willingness to respond to a “call to action” on behalf of coworkers experiencing wage theft. Whether the call to action comes from a hypothetical neighbor or a coworker, mobilizing messages are equally effective at increasing a willingness to take a variety of actions. We also uncover important gender differences; our treatment effects are detectable only among female respondents. The findings are consistent with a “whole worker” approach to organizing while also highlighting wage theft as a salient issue, especially among women.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Right to Work or Right to Vote? Labor Policy and American Democracy

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-01-14 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  There is growing attention to the role of organized labor in maintaining and expanding democratic institutions in the United States. In this article, we investigate the effect of right-to-work laws on electoral democracy in the states. We theorize a series of mechanisms by which labor unions contribute to the maintenance and expansion of democratic institutions, including contributing money to campaigns and influencing the electorate. Right-to-work laws, by limiting labor unions’ ability to raise funds, reduce the strength of these mechanisms and send signals to political elites about the organizational balance of power in their states. Using recent advances in difference-in-differences analysis, we find that right-to-work laws had a substantial negative effect on state-level electoral democracy in recent decades, even net of Republican control of government. Although the difficulty of causal identification in this context warrants caution, the findings speak to the importance of organized labor in shaping democratic institutions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Political Effects of Affirmative Action: Evidence from Court Mandates to Law Enforcement Agencies

  The Journal of Legal Studies · 2025-06-01

  articleSenior author

  Affirmative action programs in public sector agencies are a canonical example of race-conscious remedial policy. While these regimes increase public sector diversity, they may also generate political backlash. In particular, they are thought to have increased support for the Republican Party in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, there has been relatively little quantitative study of potential political backlash to the implementation of race-conscious affirmative action policies. Exploiting the onset of court-mandated affirmative action plans in US law enforcement agencies, difference-in-differences analyses suggest a positive effect of affirmative action on Democratic vote shares. These partisan effects are not driven by increased overall turnout. Although the potential for endogeneity merits caution in interpretation, the results complicate some conventional narratives about the political consequences of race-conscious social policy.

  PublisherDOI

• Improving Compliance in Experimental Studies of Discrimination

  The Journal of Politics · 2024-12-12 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  In experimental studies of discrimination, researchers often manipulate cues of social identities such as race to isolate their discriminatory effects, holding all else constant. However, these studies cannot distinguish between noncompliance, in which respondents do not observe, acknowledge, or update their beliefs about the social identity being signaled, and nondiscrimination, in which respondents update their beliefs based on the signal but do not discriminate. Focusing on experiments addressing racial discrimination, we find evidence from a preregistered, nationally representative survey experiment that racialized name cues suffer from compliance as low as 33%, especially for Black treatments. Adding pretested racialized pictures and resumé items improves compliance to 95% on average and reduces the variance in compliance across racial treatment groups. Our simulation studies show that this noncompliance tends to attenuate the estimated effects of race by as much as 85%, implying that racial discrimination may be much deeper than decades of experiments have suggested.

  PublisherDOI

• Old Money: Campaign Finance and Gerontocracy in the United States

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 10 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Race and Historical Political Economy

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-01-26 · 3 citations

  book-chapter

  Abstract This chapter examines the study of race in historical political economy (HPE) research on the United States. Scholarship in race and HPE is wide-ranging, spanning the fields of political science, economics, history, and sociology, and featuring a diversity of theoretical and empirical methods. The chapter highlights key questions in the race and HPE literature, including democratization, the effects of slavery and segregation (both de jure and de facto), racial exclusion in the welfare state, and coercive state development. The chapter then circumscribes time periods under study: the antebellum, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, New Deal, civil rights, and post-civil rights periods. Finally, the article discusses limitations in the race and HPE literature and lessons that can be drawn from research in American political development and racial capitalism.

  PublisherDOI

• Which States Adopt Election-Subversion Policies?

  The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · 2023-07-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Research highlights a growing divergence among U.S. states in their costs of voting, the partisan balance of their legislative districts, and the responsiveness of state policy to public opinion. Less is known, however, about a new and acute threat to democracy at the state level: policies that increase the states’ vulnerability to election subversion. In this article, we investigate recent trends in state legislation that transfer election administration authority from independent to partisan actors, making it more likely that a losing presidential candidate could take office over the will of the electorate. We find that Republican control of state legislatures and the closeness of the 2020 presidential election are associated with these policies. Interestingly, these policies are mostly uncorrelated with gerrymandering and voter suppression policies that were enacted in the 2010s. We conclude with a discussion of how a recent Electoral Count Act reform in Congress partly mitigates the risk of election subversion.

  PublisherDOI

• Electoral Democracy and Working‐Age Mortality

  Milbank Quarterly · 2023-05-26 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Policy Points The erosion of electoral democracy in the United States in recent decades may have contributed to the high and rising working-age mortality rates, which predate the COVID-19 pandemic. Eroding electoral democracy in a US state was associated with higher working-age mortality from homicide, suicide, and especially from drug poisoning and infectious disease. State and federal efforts to strengthen electoral democracy, such as banning partisan gerrymandering, improving voter enfranchisement, and reforming campaign finance laws, could potentially avert thousands of deaths each year among working-age adults. CONTEXT: Working-age mortality rates are high and rising in the United States, an alarming fact that predates the COVID-19 pandemic. Although several reasons for the high and rising rates have been hypothesized, the potential role of democratic erosion has been overlooked. This study examined the association between electoral democracy and working-age mortality and assessed how economic, behavioral, and social factors may have contributed to it. METHODS: We used the State Democracy Index (SDI), an annual summary of each state's electoral democracy from 2000 to 2018. We merged the SDI with annual age-adjusted mortality rates for adults 25-64 years in each state. Models estimated the association between the SDI and working-age mortality (from all causes and six specific causes) within states, adjusting for political party control, safety net generosity, union coverage, immigrant population, and stable characteristics of states. We assessed whether economic (income, unemployment), behavioral (alcohol consumption, sleep), and social (marriage, violent crime, incarceration) factors accounted for the association. FINDINGS: Increasing electoral democracy in a state from a moderate level (defined as the third quintile of the SDI distribution) to a high level (defined as the fifth quintile) was associated with an estimated 3.2% and 2.7% lower mortality rate among working-age men and women, respectively, over the next year. Increasing electoral democracy in all states from the third to the fifth quintile of the SDI distribution may have resulted in 20,408 fewer working-age deaths in 2019. The democracy-mortality association mainly reflected social factors and, to a lesser extent, health behaviors. Increasing electoral democracy in a state was mostly strongly associated with lower mortality from drug poisoning and infectious diseases, followed by reductions in homicide and suicide. CONCLUSIONS: Erosion of electoral democracy is a threat to population health. This study adds to growing evidence that electoral democracy and population health are inextricably linked.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul Frymer

  36 shared

• Charlotte Hill

  University of California, Berkeley

  7 shared

• Jennifer Karas Montez

  Syracuse University

  6 shared

• Alexander Sahn

  5 shared

• Jacob S. Hacker

  Yale University

  5 shared

• Sarah Staszak

  Princeton Public Schools

  4 shared

• Anna Zajacova

  3 shared

• Steven H. Woolf

  Virginia Commonwealth University

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Princeton University

• B.A., Political Science

  University of California, Berkeley