I am a dual degree candidate for PhD in Political Science and a Master's in Statistics at the University of Michigan.

My research primarily focuses on the politics of inflationary surprise, using methodological approaches that incorporate causal inference and formal modeling.

My current research project explores the role of identity and economic class in shaping political preference.

My other academic areas of interest are probability theory and econometrics.

Working Papers

1. 1. Economic Origins of Exclusionary Attitudes
   Abstract Request
   A wave of recent empirical studies has causally demonstrated that negative income shocks can encourage exclusionary political preferences, yet the theoretical mechanisms underlying this attitudinal shift remain underexplored, and the existing evidence draws exclusively from Western democracies. To address the theoretical gap, I develop a structural model to study this attitudinal shift as a strategic interaction. I posit that exclusionary attitudes are voters’ utilitarian responses to negative income shocks, which they seek to compensate for through group status, and that the magnitude of this response is shaped by group size and post-shock welfare interventions. To enrich existing empirical studies, I replicate analogous findings of this attitudinal shift in the setting of inter-religious group dynamics in Indonesia between 2014 and 2015 by leveraging instrumental variable research design. This evidence also demonstrates that the behavioral shift occurs primarily among individuals from majority group and non-welfare beneficiaries.
2. 2. Endogenous Central Bank Reform in Autocracies
   Abstract Request
   Existing studies suggest that autocracies with a higher degree of Central Bank Independence (CBI) perform relatively better at managing inflation compared to their peers. Even when CBI does not help mitigate inflation, the question remains as to why this reform was implemented in the first place in this regime. The current literature predominantly attributes the reform to external pressures, yet its domestic origins remain largely unexplained. Building on the literature on authoritarian politics and bargaining theory, I argue that dictators introduce CBI as a strategic initiative to expand their personal power from an initially weak bargaining position. I demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, that dictators personalize their regimes through the reform when their ruling-elite coalitions are consolidated. Leveraging the most recent measures in the literature, the estimated effects are large and statistically significant, robust to time- and covariate-level heterogeneity, and insensitive to omitted-variable bias.