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Abstract: Do governments discriminate against foreign-owned firms in enforcing regulations? Politicians may favor and protect domestic-owned firms through relaxed enforcement. Yet even absent protectionism, bureaucratic regulators may discriminate against foreign-owned firms through an informational mechanism. Enforcement requires detecting violations, but regulators cannot perfectly observe them. In jurisdictions with relatively stringent regulations, external ownership—foreign or domestic non-local—signals less familiarity with local rules and a greater violation risk. Regulators therefore target externally owned firms for extra scrutiny, such as inspections. I examine U.S. environmental regulation, where states conduct most enforcement and can adopt stricter standards. I combine administrative records of scrutiny and penalties with plant-level ownership data, covering 2.4 million plants. Scrutiny rises substantially after plants are taken over by foreign owners, more modestly after out-of-state takeovers, and remains unchanged after in-state takeovers. Mechanism tests and regulator interviews suggest these patterns represent proactive targeting. This information-driven bias is concentrated in Democratic strongholds, which tend to have more stringent regulations. Political favoritism appears toward domestic campaign donors in Republican strongholds, where corporate influence is greater. Rather than protectionism, information-driven bias within the bureaucracy drives discrimination against foreign investors.

• ISA Martin O. Heisler Best Paper Award, 2026 (Honorable Mention)

• Abstract: Nationalism is a popular explanation for opposition to globalization, yet existing studies overlook its multifaceted nature. I argue that two distinct nationalist predispositions, national chauvinism and national pride, have contrasting effects on globalization preferences. National chauvinism drives opposition to globalization, whereas national pride fosters support for globalization, because they shape how individuals interpret information about globalization in different ways. I examine all known public opinion surveys that allow for the measurement of these two predispositions and globalization preferences, covering 46 developed and developing countries from 1994 to 2025. I show that individuals high in national pride but low in chauvinism are consistently more supportive of trade, inward foreign direct investment, immigration, and international organizations, even after controlling for economic self-interest through regression adjustment and propensity-score-based weighting. These findings hold in most sample countries across three decades, including recent years of rising populist anti-globalism and geopolitical tensions. I probe the causal interpretation of these correlational findings in two steps. First, a panel subset of the data and a natural-experimental design show that nationalist predispositions are stable within individuals over time, making short-term effects of changing nationalism unlikely. Second, I use an original survey experiment to test whether these stable predispositions nonetheless shape how individuals respond to information about globalization, providing evidence for the proposed informational mechanisms.

• Presented at MPSA,2024; ISA, 2025; Cornell, 2025; APSA 2025; Pre-ISA Workshop at OSU, 2026.

• APSA Best Poster Award, 2025.

• Abstract: Countries have signed over 4,500 bilateral tax treaties (BTTs) to avoid double-taxing income earned by firms and individuals in host states. BTTs limit the host state’s claim on each overlapping tax base while allowing the home state to tax the remainder, and many argue that BTTs increasingly restrict host states’ taxing rights—undermining developing countries’ ability to tax foreign firms and facilitating tax avoidance. Assessing when and why states accept lower host taxing rights, however, remains challenging due to the absence of a comprehensive dataset on BTT provisions. I construct the first global dataset of BTT contents, coding 20 provisions in over 4,000 treaties to quantify host taxing rights across diverse tax bases. I argue that democracies and leftist governments selectively concede host taxing rights to attract foreign firms’ business and investment. I find that democracies across the ideological spectrum, as well as leftist nondemocracies, grant lower host taxing rights—but only on incomes and payments generated exclusively by foreign firms, not on other tax bases such as foreign individuals’ income or domestic firms’ outgoing payments. These findings suggest that the rise of global tax evasion reflects uneven state agency, not merely uniform pressures from the treaty regime. Among democracies, moreover, partisan preferences for taxation appear to stop at the water’s edge.

• Presented at Asian PolMeth 2024; APSA 2024; IPES 2025; ISA, 2026.