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

My research investigates the relationship of political institutions, social identity, and economic class, with methodological interests in causal inference and formal modeling.

I am also interested in probability theory and econometrics.

My recent working papers are listed below.

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
   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.