Dissertation & Working Papers

Research

Heterogeneous Firms and the Politics of Institutional Change argues that firms differ in their exposure to globalization and technological change — and that this heterogeneity drives divergent political behavior and reshapes the institutions meant to govern it.

Job Market Paper

The Effect of Trade on Wage Protections

This paper provides evidence that trade liberalization generates divergent political behavior towards labor institutions across firms within industries. This firm-centered perspective helps explain variation in welfare state responses to trade and provides micro-foundations for understanding how globalization reshapes the politics of labor regulation. I test my argument using confidential U.S. Census microdata linking establishment-level employment and wage records (LEHD) to firm-level trade transactions (LFTTD) and business registry data (LBD). I find that greater state-level export intensity is associated with higher minimum wages, with effects concentrated among the most productive exporters.

Co-authored

U.S. Multinationals and Preferential Market Access

This paper asks whether multinational firms are systematically associated with more favorable preferential tariff outcomes than observationally comparable non-multinationals importing the same products from the same countries. We construct a novel panel dataset linking confidential U.S. Census trade transaction records (LFTTD) to firm characteristics (LBD, CMF) and preferential tariff rates at the HS8-country-year level. Multinational status is associated with approximately two percentage points lower preferential tariff rates, conditional on product, country, industry, and year fixed effects.

Work in progress

AI Firms and the Politics of Labor

This paper shows that technological change can reconstitute the coalitional foundations of skill-training institutions in new ways. If AI's skill-equalizing properties make workforce investment worthwhile across a broader range of industries, firms previously divided by different skill needs and production strategies may converge on shared political priorities around workforce development. I test this using a novel linkage of LinkedIn job vacancy microdata from Revelio Labs to federal lobbying disclosures in LobbyView, exploiting ChatGPT's November 2022 release as a source of quasi-experimental variation in AI adoption.

Future Directions

Beyond my dissertation, my research agenda extends in two directions: 1. the fissuring of the firm: how subcontracting and misclassification change firms' political incentives, and 2. whether AI adoption divides firms’ preferences towards high-skilled immigration.