Welcome! I am the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences in the department of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. This year I am a visiting scholar at Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions (SCCEI).
My research centers on the political economy of non-democracies, with a regional focus on China. I am interested in how individual actors (e.g., citizens, firms) interact with the state and state agents that are not held accountable by elections, and how these interactions affect outcomes such as economic growth, government service, quality of institutions, and policy changes. Specifically, my research addresses three distinct sets of questions in non-democracies:
1. How does China sustain its economic growth with weak institutions?
2. What explains the quality of authoritarian institutions?
3. How do institutions treat disadvantaged groups (e.g., ethnic minorities; female politicians)? How do these groups affect institutions and policy changes?
My book The Private Sector in Public Office: Selective Property Rights in China (October 2019, Cambridge University Press) examines strategies Chinese private entrepreneurs use to protect property from expropriation.
I am a faculty affiliate of Penn's Center for the Study of Contemporary China (CSCC), Penn Identity and Conflict Lab (PIC Lab), and Penn Development Research Initiative (PDRI).
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