Research
Publications
The Hole Dug Deeper: Flash floods, income disparities, and labor informality in Brazil (2025)
Published in Ecological Economics, this article investigates the labor market channels through which climate shocks (in the form of flash floods) widen income disparities in middle-income countries, using Brazil as a case study. Specifically, I explore how labor informality and employment in vulnerable industries prime low-income workers for larger income losses following sudden climate shocks. Economic losses among vulnerable workers persist into the medium-term, reinforcing income disparities in already highly unequal contexts, and highlighting one avenue through which climate change and associated disasters will worsen income inequality in the coming years.
This book chapter, part of the edited volume The Concept Design of a 21st Century Preferential Trade Agreement: Trends and Future Innovations, charts the evolution of labour provisions in trade agreements, why they have failed, and how they might be improved in the future.
This article in International Interactions explores how increasing foreign investment flows from the global south can act as a transmission belt for improved working conditions in home countries. We tease out the role of host-country labor regulations via a comparative research design juxtaposing FDI into relatively high-standard Western Europe and the relatively low-standard United States, building on the CPE approach in our earlier work.
South to north investment linkages and decent work in Brazil (2023)
Over the last 25 years, the BRICs asserted themselves as drivers of globalization. But what does their new‐found prominence mean for working conditions at home? Using a novel sub‐national database covering outward investment linkages and working conditions in Brazilian municipalities, this study, published in Labour, tests whether a direct investment in Europe leads to the introduction of decent working conditions in Brazil. The empirical results provide strong support for the investing‐up effect using a mixture of panel data analysis and text analysis. The results suggest that economic integration with high‐standard developed countries can act as a powerful mechanism for labor standard improvements in developing countries
In our Foreign Policy Analysis article, we revisit how Chinese foreign aid should be understood by incorporating its dominant, commercially oriented state financing, which prior studies often dismissed as purely economic. We argue that ignoring this form of aid overlooks China’s distinctive belief that assistance should be mutually beneficial rather than purely concessional. Using UN General Assembly voting patterns, we show that Chinese commercial aid fosters political alignment with Beijing, revealing that its aid generates geopolitical influence in ways that differ from traditional donors.
In this paper, published in Public Choice, we wade into the debate over how electoral institutions affect trade policy. Previous work had primarily relied on the PR-Plurality divide, resulting in competing theoretical priors and contradictory results. We introduce a novel measure of electoral institutions which is informed by the comparative politics literature on personal-vote incentives. Our PVI-derived measure performs better than the dichotomous variables and is a consistent and robust predictor of trade policies. We ultimately find that systems that incentivize the cultivation of a personal relationship between legislators and their constituencies, all else equal, have less liberal trade policies.
Works-in-Progress
(R&R at Review of International Political Economy) In this article I extend the impact of the China Shock to competition in third markets, and the effect on labor informality in middle-income countries. I argue that increasing competition with relatively inexpensive and plentiful Chinese manufactures in third markets displaces the goods of competitors following the accession of China to the WTO, contributing to premature deindustrialization. At the same time, China’s growing demand for commodities contributes to growth in associated sectors, which are hotbeds for informal labor and other labor rights violations. Results indicate that, indeed, increasing product-level competition with Chinese manufactures in third-markets both increases the rate of deindustrialization and informality.
Capturing System-Level Personal Vote Incentives
(Under review at Party Politics) An influential body of research in comparative politics investigates the institutional sources of political candidates’ incentives to cultivate a base of electoral support independent from their party identification. These so-called personal-vote incentives (PVI) have been found to vary systematically across configurations of electoral rules. The tasks of data collection and PVI index construction have presented high barriers to comparative researchers. The dataset we present here is intended to reduce these obstacles. Drawing primarily from widely used and open databases, we calculate four popular PVI indices for the 1985-2022 period as well as modified versions of two of these indices to account for recent evidence of candidates’ own perceptions of their electoral incentives.
This study isolates the causal mechanism behind the Shanghai and California Effects by testing whether weaker regulatory pressure—rather than lower prices—from Chinese buyers, relative to buyers from high-standard markets, reduces exporters’ willingness to adopt private labor regulations. To test this, we conduct a pre-registered online survey experiment with 940 Brazilian managers. The results show no significant difference in willingness to adopt private regulation based on buyer origin. This null effect holds across sectors and firm ownership structures.These findings suggest that if a Shanghai Effect exists, it is unlikely to be driven by variation in regulatory pressure and instead reflects broader price-based dynamics in global trade.
Unearthing Discontent: Mining Ownership, Extraction, and Socio-environmental Protest in Peru
This paper explores the societal impact of mining in Peru, a key region for the resources needed in the green transition to address climate change. Using detailed protest and mining data across Peruvian districts between 2006 and 2020, this study uses interactive fixed effects and causal panel data models to examine how company nationality and mining output volume affect the likelihood of social unrest, providing insights into the complexities of resource extraction in regions vital to the global economy.