student

I specialize in comparative politics, with a focus on the political economy of development and political behavior. My dissertation, which I will defend in early 2012, consists of three essays that investigate how tax and non-tax government revenue shape the political behavior of citizens. It is widely believed that natural resource wealth, foreign aid, and other types of windfall revenue undermine development. Scholars of the "resource curse" have offered many explanations for this phenomenon, but we still know little about which mechanisms have explanatory power, under what conditions, and how they relate to one another. During nearly two years of fieldwork in Indonesia, I implemented two large-scale projects to shed new light on leading explanations for the resource curse. The projects use experiments and extensive original data collection to reveal how both incentives and information shape the political behavior of citizens in tax and windfall environments. In addition to my dissertation, I have ongoing projects that examine the relationship between information and accountability, as well as the causes of conflict and paths to post-conflict reintegration.