Courts and Governance
2014
"Taking the Law to Court: Citizen Suits and the Legislative Process"
I propose a formal representation of the way in which citizen suits aggregate the preferences of the citizenry. I then analyze the role of citizen suits in promoting policy-making in legislatures. In my analysis, citizen suits encourage legislators to shift spending away from particularistic spending and towards public goods, and helps forge compromises that increase collective welfare.
More projects on Courts and Governance
Institutional Foundations for Sustainable Development
2014
"The Institutional Foundations of Sustainability: What Can We (Not) Learn from Political Economy?" (with Johannes Urpelainen)
We argue that the political institutions considered successful for ensuring peace and promoting growth are insufficient for meeting the challenges of sustainability. We highlight three fundamental characteristics of sustainability problems: they exhibit long-term dynamics, multiple spatial and social scales and exceptional levels of complexity. Via examples, we show why prevalent political institutions are ill-adapted and argue that we need complementary institutions.
Energy Transitions
2014 "Path Dependence, Political Competition, and Renewable Energy
Policy: A Dynamic Model" (with Johannes Urpelainen and James Rising)
We seek to understand the political determinants of energy transitions by modeling the iterated political competition between parties holding different preferences regarding clean energy production in a world characterized by stochastic energy prices and technological learning. We do this by developing a computational game theoretic model. We find path dependence in energy transitions, and show that political dynamics affect investment paths particularly when one party is more ideologically committed than the other.
Methods
2012 "Conflict and Causal Inference with Spatially Disaggregated Data : Potentials and Limits" (with Johannes Castner and Peter Gocev)
Sub-national geographical information allows us to go beyond cross-national analyses of conflict. Yet, many empirical analyses attempting to test causal claims and making use of such disaggregated data do not deal with the fact that actors of a conflict within a polity are strategically interdependent. In the causal inference framework, this represents a major violation of SUTVA, which cannot simply be corrected by controlling for spatial spillovers. We argue that theoretical models of civil conflict are incompatible with standard empirical approaches that use sub-national data and propose alternative uses of this data.
Prior Work in Environmental Science
2011 "Modeling Biogeochemical Processes of Phosphorus for Global Food Supply" (with Emmanuel Frossard and Roland Scholz)
This paper proposes a simple model to represent the coupled dynamics of phosphorus in the soil and in the human agricultural system. The primary contribution is a parsimonious representation of the soil cycle, appropriate for assessing the sustainability of the anthropogenic food cycle at the global scale. A small dataset provides a preliminary test of the proposed soil cycle model.