Job Market Paper

    • Latest Draft: Here

    • Abstract: Do governments discriminate against foreign-owned firms in enforcing regulations? Politicians may protect domestic-owned firms through relaxed enforcement. Yet anti-foreign bias can arise even under politicians who are not protectionist and value stringent regulation: bureaucratic regulators tasked with strengthening enforcement may discriminate through an informational mechanism. Enforcement requires detecting violations, but regulators cannot perfectly observe them. Where politicians promote stringent regulations, external ownership — foreign or domestic non-local — may signal less familiarity with local rules and greater violation risk. Regulators therefore target externally owned firms for additional scrutiny, such as inspections. I examine U.S. environmental regulation, where states can adopt stricter standards and conduct most enforcement. I link administrative records of scrutiny and penalties to ownership data covering 2.4 million plants since 1989. Scrutiny rises after plants are taken over by foreign owners while remaining unchanged after in-state takeovers. This reaction reflects information-driven discrimination: it extends to out-of-state takeovers and is concentrated in Democratic strongholds, where pro-regulatory politicians have promoted stringent state-specific regulations. It does not reflect political favoritism: penalty decisions show no comparable ownership bias but favor campaign donors. Rather than protectionism, information-driven bias within the bureaucracy drives discrimination against foreign investors.

Working Papers

    • 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. Original surveys provide additional evidence for the 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.

Work in Progress

  • Foreign Investment and Regulatory Enforcement (Dissertation Book Project)

    • Supported by APSA-NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant

  • Multinational Firms’ Subnational Influence

  • Reshoring with In Song Kim (MIT) and Tyler Sagerstrom (MIT).

  • Fair and Equitable Treatment with Michael Allen (Stanford).