Peer Reviewed Publication
Abstract
In this paper, I present a theory of domestic support for foreign aid in the United States, focusing on the role played by American development firms or aid awardees in domestic politics. USAID delivers foreign aid to recipient countries through contracts with private for-profit development firms and non-profit organizations, most of which originate from America. This paper argues that these domestic firms promote domestic support for foreign aid by creating distributional effects and disseminating information through lobbying. This information includes not only the significance of foreign aid but also its distributive benefits to legislators' districts. Analyzing district-level USAID award data and firm-level lobby data from the 111th to the 115th Congress, I found that the district-level allocation of contracts is positively associated with the frequency of (co)sponsorship for pro-foreign aid-related bills.Working Papers
Abstract
In my book-style dissertation, I explore how foreign direct investments shape public attitudes toward foreign economic policies and globalization. Canonical economic theories have diagnosed the rise of the anti-globalization movement and far-right parties as a product of the economic losers of globalization. Moving beyond these theories, which rely on the distributive effects of globalization, I investigate how foreign companies' bad actions, such as unfair treatment of workers and environmental damage, undermine public support for open foreign economic policies and increase hostility toward partner countries.Using experimental and observational studies, I examine the effect of these bad actions in OECD countries to test my theory at three levels: the individual worker level, the community level, and the country level. First, I conduct a survey at the individual worker level in the U.S. to demonstrate that negative work experiences at foreign companies increase antipathy toward foreign investments and partner countries. In another chapter, I show that exposure to negative information about a foreign company's business practices triggers public backlash in the U.S. This analysis includes conjoint and survey experiments, and observational studies using foreign investment data, firms' regulatory violations, news, surveys, and voting data. In the final empirical chapter, I investigate how labor laws in the Global North influence industrial relations between foreign companies and their workers and foreign investment policies. I argue that institutional tools like works councils, which promote cooperative industrial relations, boost local workers' support for foreign investments.
- What Money Can't (or Can) Buy: Inward Foreign Direct Investment and Backlash against Globalization in the United States (Job Market Paper) [paper]
Abstract
While foreign direct investment (FDI) is often welcomed by host communities, there are instances when even the direct economic beneficiaries of FDI oppose foreign investments. In this paper, I explore the role of foreign companies in either mitigating or exacerbating public backlash against FDI and globalization more generally in the United States. By applying intergroup contact theory, I examine how the foreign companies' deviation from local norms—such as violations of labor laws—shape public opinion toward partner countries and foreign investment policies. This study highlights the significance of foreign firms' interactions with two distinct groups. First, individual workers' experiences in foreign companies influence their perceptions of partner countries and their preferences for new foreign investments. Second, at the community level, exposure to negative information about foreign companies' business practices affects public views on open foreign economic policies and attitudes toward foreign countries. Using an original survey, survey experiments, and regression analyses, I investigate how foreign companies' unfair treatment of workers and violations of local regulations lead to public backlash against open foreign economic policies. The findings from the survey and experiments suggest that breaking host country's norms and laws suppress public support for open foreign investment policies and mitigate the positive effects on public opinion engendered by FDI, while observational studies provide additional evidence.
Abstract
Many inferential tasks require estimating uncertainty around predictions of an outcome at points not in the data. Conventional approaches choose and fit a model on the observed data then compute uncertainty estimates using that fit, producing uncertainty estimates that neglect the increasing impact of model uncertainty further from observed data points. After describing this problem, we consider the Gaussian Process (GP) as an attractive solution, as it estimates (in closed-form) a posterior distribution for the predicted values at test points of interest that automatically combines information about model fit and how far the points in question are from observations. We offer an accessible explanation of GPs emphasizing this feature, and develop a simple, fully-automated approach to handling hyperparameters that have proven a source of difficulty in prior implementations (implemented in theR package gpss). We then illustrate how GPs aid in capturing counterfactual uncertainty in three settings where model dependency leads to inferential risks: (i) comparisons in which treated and control groups have poor covariate overlap; (ii) interrupted time series designs, where models fitted prior to an event are extrapolated to later time points; and (iii) regression discontinuity, where inferences depend on point and uncertainty estimates at the very edges of their supporting data.