Here are titles, abstracts, and links to my most recent working papers. (Check back often; more are always on the way!)
The Electoral College and Distributive Presidential Politics
(with In Schlagel)
Do presidents increase the flow of federal funds to states that experience an increase in electoral votes? "Common sense" would suggest the answer is "yes." However, a winning strategy may involve a president seeking collections of small states (which have more electoral votes per capita). This is particularly true given that electoral votes are allocated on a "winner take all" basis in all but two US states. Notably, recent applied studies of distributive presidential politics focus on county-and/or district-level data. They do not speak directly to the value of additional electoral votes in presidential strategies. In this paper, we estimate the effect of an additional electoral vote on the federal grants per capita a state receives. We employ both "doubly robust" and stacked difference-indifferences (DiD) estimators. Using data from 1983 through 2024, the results are sensitive to when treatment years are defined (subsequent presidential election versus decennial census years). However, the point estimates for post-treatment effects consistently become negative over time. Moreover, all statistically significant post-treatment effects are negative.
Adverse Selection in Constitutional Change and the Alleged Unamendability of the US Constitution
A society's constitutional order changes when the benefits to creating/exchanging political property rights exceed the costs of doing so. But there are various avenues through which this can occur. Formal Constitutional design is one avenue; judicial review, executive orders, and changes in constitutional norms are others. Constitutional change will always be efficient. However, efficiently does not necessarily imply socially desirable (Leeson 2020). Efficient constitutional change may be "bad." Furthermore, the relative costs of different avenues are interdependent on their relative uses (Young 2025a). This creates adverse selection concerns. For example, a society may be better of better off limiting constitutional change to the formal rules of Constitutional design; however, relying on judicial review might be cheaper. A "bad" avenue for constitutional change will then become self-reinforcing. For the US case, I offer suggestive evidence of adverse selection based on two historical episodes: (1) the "Switch in Time that Saved Nine" (1937) and (2) the Warren Court (1953-1969).
Bruce Ackerman is a luminary amongst constitutional law scholars. James Buchanan is the same for scholars of constitutional political economy. However, they are diametrically opposed in terms of their thinking on constitutional change. Ackerman is a decided majoritarian; alternatively, Buchanan's normative perspective is rooted in generality. Yet both Ackerman and Buchanan consider themselves constitutionalists. I provide a comparative analysis of Ackerman's views vis-àvis those of Buchanan on constitutional change. As a relative virtue, Ackerman provides more emphasis on the qualitative nature of consideration/deliberation on constitutional change; alternatively, a relative virtue of Buchanan is his insistence on generality and an (at least) implicit unwillingness to subjectively weight individuals in terms of their input to such change. I use Article V of the US Constitution as a vehicle for the comparative analysis.