CV

I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University, and a Graduate Affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences. My research focuses on contemporary issues in U.S. foreign policy, interest groups in defense policy-making, the consequences of government transparency, and political communication. These bodies of research intersect the fields of international relations, political economy, and U.S. politics. Methodologically, my interests include the analysis of text data, the application of machine learning methods to causal inference problems, and the analysis of experiments.

At Harvard, I have taught courses in research methods and statistics, international relations, political institutions, and formal theory, and been recognized by the Derek Bok Center for Distinction in Teaching. For three years, I was a Presidential Instructional Technology Fellow at Harvard, and helped to promote new active-learning instructional techniques for use in classrooms around the university.

Outside of academia, I serve as a frequent consulting statistician to the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank Group, where I have applied techniques from my academic research to dozens of programs and industries around the globe. 

Publications:

• "Estimating the Severity of the WikiLeaks U.S. Diplomatic Cables Disclosure" (with Arthur Spirling), 2015, Political Analysis 23(2), 299-305. (link)
  

Working Papers (and papers under review):

• "The Economic Benefits of Conflict? Estimating Defense Firm Responses to Major Events in U.S. Foreign Policy" (link)
• "Dimensions of Diplomacy: Understanding Private Information in International Relations Using the WikiLeaks Cable Disclosure" (with Arthur Spirling) (link)
• "How Federal Reserve Discussions Respond to Increased Transparency" (with Michael Egesdal and Martin Rotemberg) (link)
• "Bayesian Instrumental Variables with Relaxations of the Exclusion Restriction" (with Arman Sabbaghi and Benjamin Schneer) (link)
• "How Judicial Identity Changes the Text of Legal Rulings" (with Andrew Hall) (link)
• "Estimating Poverty Rates in Target Populations: An Assessment of the Simple Poverty Scorecard and Alternative Approaches" (with Alexis Diamond, Miguel Rebolledo, Emmanuel Skoufias, Katja Vinha, Yiqing Xu) (link)

Current Projects:

• "The War Lobby: Firm Politics and Portfolio Sensitivity to Wartime" 
• "Diplomatic Turnover and the Collection of Private Information" (with Arthur Spirling)
• "How does Similarity Evolve?" (with Michael Egesdal and Martin Rotemberg)
• "A Bargaining Model of War with Endogenous Coalitions"
• "Parameter Uncertainty in Tree-Based Estimation of Causal Effects"
• "Synthetic Matching with Spatial Event and Outcome Data"