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I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  I am also co-coordinator of the Global Research in Political Economy workshop, and am a faculty affiliate of the Princeton Sovereign Finance Lab.  I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, and also hold an M.A. in Economics from Yale.  My research interests include political economy, international relations, comparative politics, and formal theory. 

My work has been published or is forthcoming in the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and The Journal of Politics.  My book Democracy, Dictatorship and Default (published by Cambridge University Press) explores the political logic of international sovereign debt default, with particular emphasis on the ways that urban-rural conflicts, including sensitive food subsidies, may vary across different regime settings.  I use formal theory, large-n statistical analysis, and close case study reading including primary archival research of several countries to present substantive and robust evidence for my primary hypotheses explaining sovereign default in autocracies and democracies.  My broader research interests exist at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, and include political responses to fiscal crises as well as the effects of economic change on individual authoritarian values and demands for redistribution.