Financial sectors in the developing world pressure governments to open capital accounts, a policy which standard theories of open economy politics predicts would harm their interests. I explain this apparent contradiction by studying international financial intermediation, showing that lenders...

Cross-nationally, urbanization is associated with the decline of minority languages and a shift towards national and official languages. But the mechanisms that link urbanization with language shift remain poorly understood. We use administrative data from Indonesia — a large, ethnically and...

Common visual heuristics used to interpret marginal effects plots are susceptible to Type-1 error. This susceptibility varies as a function of (1) sample size, (2) stochastic error in the true data generating process, and (3) the relative size of the main effects of the causal variable versus...

Whorfian socioeconomics is an emerging interdisciplinary field of study that holds that linguistic structures explain differences in beliefs, values, and opinions across communities. Its core empirical strategy is to document a correlation between the presence or absence of a linguistic feature...

The premise of the postwar global political economy under the Bretton Woods system was that economic integration was desirable, but risky. Embedded liberalism enabled governments to embrace global trade while minimizing the vulnerability and economic dislocation that might follow. The premise of...

This paper studies how self-fulfilling dynamics affect the predictability of financial crises. We build a model in which market participants play an investment coordination game with common economic shocks and private information about their own willingness to cooperate. An observer attempts to...

This essay reviews the changing status of single country research in comparative politics, a field defined by the concept of comparison. An analysis of articles published in top general and comparative politics field journals reveals that single country research has evolved from an emphasis on...

This essay reviews the literature on historical persistence in political science and the related social sciences. Historical persistence refers to causal effects that (1) operate over time scales of a decade or more and (2) explain spatial variation in political, economic, or social outcomes.We...

This paper examines how political business relations have shaped country vulnerability to financial crises during periods of international financial contagion. While close relations between political and business elites in island Southeast Asia deepened vulnerability during the Asian Financial...

This paper introduces a new approach to discovering and exploring society-wide social beliefs about ethnic structure. Rooted in computational text analysis, it combines the strengths of both qualitative and survey-based approaches to the study of ethnicity. I use a structural topic modeling...