I am a dual-degree candidate for a PhD in Political Science and a Master's in Statistics, and a Research Associate at the Harvard University Asia Center.

My research focuses on the political economy of development and social identity. My current projects fall into three interrelated areas: (1) the politically endogenous origins of economic institutions, (2) the economic foundations of social identity, and (3) the making and breaking of pro-redistribution coalitions.

Methodologically, I use formal models to define a theoretically motivated estimand, and design-based inference to evaluate what the data can say about it.

I am also interested in probability theory and econometrics.

Please see abstracts of my working papers below. Drafts are available upon request.

Syamsul Bahri (Pronounced: SHAHM-sool BAH-ree)

Working Papers

1. 1. Labor Politics in a Dual Economy
   
   Preparing for submission
   Abstract Request
   Despite the global prevalence of the informal sector, political science has devoted surprisingly little attention to its distributive consequences. Using newly assembled survey data from 97 countries spanning 1987--2022, I document that a large informal sector is associated with higher poverty and income inequality, yet is unrelated to redistributive preferences in the aggregate. Exploiting a natural experiment in Indonesia, I find that informal workers hold weaker redistributive preferences than formal workers, despite earning lower incomes. Why, then, do the poor demand less redistribution? I argue that these empirical regularities indicate optimal sorting on comparative advantage. When sorting is optimal, informal workers perceive no better alternative to their economic standing, which weakens their redistributive preferences. When sorting is suboptimal, I find that their redistributive preferences are stronger. By linking micro-level sorting decisions to their macro-level consequences, this paper shows how labor-market structure shapes the demand for redistribution.
2. 2. Economic Origins of Exclusionary Attitudes
   
   Preparing for submission
   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 game-theoretic 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 an instrumental variable research design. This evidence also demonstrates that the behavioral shift occurs primarily among individuals from the majority group and among non-recipients of welfare transfers.
3. 3. Endogenous Central Bank Reform in Autocracies
   
   Preparing for submission
   Abstract Request
   Over the past four decades, a growing number of autocracies have adopted Central Bank Independence (CBI) reforms, despite lacking the credibility to make this institution an effective anti-inflationary commitment device. Existing literature attributes these trends to globalization pressures, but their domestic origins remain unexplained. I argue that, beyond inflationary concerns, dictators introduce CBI reform to personalize the regime when elites can collectively bargain for greater power-sharing. I demonstrate, formally and empirically, that dictators instrumentalize the technocratic insulation to counterbalance power-sharing pressures from the consolidated elite coalition. Drawing on recent measures of autocratic personalization, elite consolidation, and CBI for 1945--2010, counterfactual estimates from semiparametric inference, corroborated by descriptive evidence, indicate that autocratic personalization is associated with higher CBI under consolidated elites, but not when elites are fragmented. More generally, the findings suggest that the expected economic consequences of institutional reforms need not coincide with their political causes.

Work-in-Progress

1. 1. Political Aspects of Small Business Expansion
   
   Early stage
   Description
   A formal model of the preference of small enterprises over the acquisition of productive factors, focusing on politically endogenous parameters.
2. 2. Democracy and Property Rights
   
   Early stage
   Description
   Econometric evaluation on the effect of democracy on property rights protection.