In international relations, how does latent military coercion affect governments’ policy choices? Because militarily powerful governments can credibly threaten to impose their policy preferences by force, weaker governments may adjust their policy choices to avoid costly conflict. This setting raises an inference problem – do observed policies reflect the preferences of the governments that adopted them or the military constraints of the anarchic international system? Here, I investigate the role of this “shadow of power” in determining trade policy. Specifically, I build a model of trade policy choice under threat that allows me to measure empirically governments’ underlying trade policy preferences, the returns to military advantage, and the extent to which power projection capacity degrades across space. I then estimate the parameters of the model using data on governments' observed trade policies in 2011. I find that geographic distance is not an impediment to the projection of force but that there are increasing returns to military advantage in the technology of coercion. Through counterfactual experiments, I quantify the effect of military constraints on the international economy and governments' welfare. These and other exercises simultaneously shed light on how military power affects international economic exchange, and how patterns of trade and protectionism affect the governments' propensity to engage in military conflict.

APSA 2019, Formal Models of International Relations 2020

In this study, we explore the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and within- and cross-country barriers to trade. We develop a spatial model of trade in which observable weather shocks affect local productivity. These shocks directly affect local prices and propagate through the trading network differentially depending on unobserved trading frictions. Coupling data describing monthly commodity prices in 230 cities across 42 African counties, remotely sensed weather data, and spatial data describing the locations of ethnic-group homelands, we estimate this model to quantify the costs traders incur when crossing ethnic and national borders. Our results show that ethnic borders induce a friction approximately one quarter the magnitude of national borders, indicating that ethnic heterogeneity is an impediment to the development of efficient national markets. Through counterfactual experiments, we quantify the effect of these frictions on prices and the extent to which colonial-era political borders have hindered African economic integration. In all, our paper suggests that trade impediments caused by ethnic borders are a substantial channel through which ethnic fractionalization impacts development.

PolMeth 2020

Street gangs are conjectured to engage in violent territorial competition. This competition can be difficult to study empirically as the number of gangs and the division of territory between them are usually unobserved to the analyst. However, traces of gang conflict manifest themselves in police and administrative data on violent crime. In this paper, we show that the frequency and location of shootings are sufficient statistics number of gangs in operation and the territorial partition beween them under mild assumptions about the data generating processes for gang-related and non-gang related shootings. We then show how to estimate this territorial partition from a panel of geolocated shooting data. We apply our method to analyze the structure of gang territorial competition in Chicago using victim-based crime reports from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and validate our methodology on gang territorial maps produced by the CPD. We detect the presence of 3-4 gangs whose estimated territorial footprints we match to CPD maps. After matching, 56-60 percent of our partition labels agree with those of the CPD. This performance compares favorably to an agreement rate of 35 percent when CPD labels are randomly permuted.

To what extent is international trade free and fair? Because policy barriers to trade are often opaque and take on many forms, it is difficult to answer this question while relying on data on observable trade barriers. Here, I propose and implement a structural approach to estimating the magnitude of policy barriers to trade, measured at the trade partner level. The method allows for the possibility that these barriers are both asymmetric and discriminatory, affecting certain trade partners disproportionately. The approach reveals substantial latent policy barriers to trade, many times larger than observed tariffs. It also implies substantial effective policy discrimination, with exporters in subset of favored countries enjoying far superior market access conditions than their peers in unfavored countries. Combined, these results suggest that the existing world trading system remains far from a free and fair ideal.

MPSA 2019, ISA-MW 2019, SPSA 2020

Countries with deep trading relationships rarely fight wars with one another. Here, I develop a theory of trade, war, and political bias, in which both trade and war are endogenous objects. Governments can rectify poor market access conditions abroad through war and subsequent regime change, in which the victorious country installs a liberal “puppet” government abroad. Trade policy bargaining is therefore conducted “in the shadow of power,” with counterfactual wars shaping the policy choices that prevail in times of peace. When peace prevails, militarily weak countries are more open to trade than powerful ones, all else equal. Equilibrium trade policies balance domestic interests against military threats from abroad. War is less likely between liberal governments because they prefer less protectionist trade policies. As a result, trade flows and the probability of peace are positively correlated in equilibrium, even though trade does not cause peace.

MPSA 2018, SPSA 2019, ISA 2019, Online Peace Science Colloquium 2019