Research

Job Market Paper:

"The Relationship Between PhRMA Campaign Donations and Favorable Legislation: A Natural Language Processing Application"

• • This is the first paper to analyze empirically the relationship between legislation favorability and special interest group donations. Natural language processing was used to generate similarity scores between mock legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council , a group associated with Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), and legislation introduced in the US House of Representatives to create measures of ``PhRMA Favorability'' for legislators. These measures were analyzed with campaign donations to House of Representatives members from PhRMA PACs. OLS regression with fixed effects and clustered errors was utilized on an unbalanced panel of sitting legislators from the 114th Congress (2013/14) through the 116th Congress (2019/20). I find that increasing a legislator's previous Congress PhRMA favorability by one standard deviation increases their current Congress PhRMA PAC donations by between 0.107 and 0.147 standard deviations depending on PhRMA favorability measure, and that increasing a legislator's previous congress PhRMA PAC donations by one standard deviation increases their PhRMA favorability in the current Congress by between 0.009 and 0.118 standard deviations depending on PhRMA favorability measure.

Other Working Papers:

"The Economic and Demographic Determinants of Donald Trump's 2016 Election Victory"

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3264520

• • This paper utilizes cluster-robust, fixed effects OLS regression to find that long term negative economic indicators, white, non-bachelor's degree holding male populations, and to a far lesser extent, short-term economic improvements were indicative of Donald Trump support in the 2016 election. I then utilize this analysis to quantify the effect that each of these factors had on Trump's electoral college victory. By the most conservative estimate, Trump losing either the voters from long term economic conditions or from white-male, non-bachelor's degree holding populations would have led to Hillary Clinton having won the election. Trump would still have won the election having lost the voters from short term economic changes, even by the most liberal estimates. 

Works in Progress:

"How Favorable Healthcare Legislation Influences Healthcare Stock Performance"

"Political Action Committee Donations To Incumbent Senators; A Corruption Motive"