I am a Senior Lecturer of Political Science at NYU Abu Dhabi.
My research is in comparative and historical political economy, with a substantive focus on American political development. I am especially interested in understanding how state and local political institutions emerged and persisted over time, and how these institutions shaped the development of fiscal capacity, the incidence of taxation, and patterns of public spending. My work has also examined how political institutions shape patterns of political violence throughout American history. I primarily study these questions using large datasets constructed from previously underutilized historical government documents. My recent work also draws on large-scale historical administrative records and computational text methods to revisit long-standing questions, including producing new estimates of U.S. Civil War mortality and spatial variation in religiosity.