Research

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• "Partisanship in the Trump Trade War: Evidence from County-Level Crop Planting Data" (with Shannon Carcelli). International Studies Quarterly 68(4): sqae141. [preprint].
  View Abstract ▼
  In 2018, the US-China trade war drove down the price of many US agricultural goods. While many farmers responded by planting alternative crops instead, others continued planting the low-value crops, with a high cost to their bottom line and resulting in a large number of agricultural bankruptcies. Why did some farmers disregard their own economic interests and plant low-value crops during the trade war? We argue that political preferences partially explain farmer behavior. Matching geo-referenced crop data to product-level sanctions lists from China, we calculate county-level changes in the planting of crops affected by the tariffs. We find that counties with a higher Trump vote share in the 2016 election were significantly less likely to change planting decisions due to the trade war. This suggests that partisanship may affect the economy more broadly than previously realized.

Working Papers

• "Firm Connectivity and Demands for Trade Protection under Global Value Chains" (under review).
  View Abstract ▼
  Much of the literature assumes that firms within each domestic industry will uniformly support antidumping (AD) duties, a trade policy used globally to shield domestic industries from foreign competition. However, I find that many firms remain silent or oppose AD petitions in the US. I provide a firm-level theory that explains how a firm’s foreign business connections (dis)incentivize protection through AD. Domestic firms may expect losses from AD to exceed gains when targeted foreign firms can pass along the costs of AD through global value chains or when targeted governments can retaliate through trade and investment barriers. I test my theory with a firm-level dataset that considers all domestic firms involved in US AD cases between 2010 and 2020 matched with millions of shipment records representing their foreign connections. I find that firms that trade more with, and have more affiliates in targeted countries are less likely to request AD.
• "Government-imposed Restrictions on International Economic Relations," (with Timothy Peterson and Dursun Peksen).
  View Abstract ▼
  This paper introduces the "Government-imposed Restrictions on International Economic Relations" (GRIER) dataset. Existing data projects have been instrumental in identifying major sanctions cases or episodes. However, legacy data are limited in their ability to account for substantive heterogeneity and temporal evolution of specific economic restrictions imposed, which has limited scholars' ability to capture the increasingly complex nature of sanctions over time. Using each restriction (i.e., the specific banned interaction across international borders) as the unit of analysis, the GRIER dataset codes all government-mandated restrictions by the EU, the UN, and the US for the years spanning 1992 to 2025. With a discussion of coding procedures and illustrations of summary statistics, we demonstrate that the GRIER dataset will help researchers test novel theories on the use, effectiveness, and consequences of sanctions on all sanctioned entities (e.g., states, individuals, and firms).

Works in Progress

• "Who Paid for the US-China Trade War? Evidence from Section 301 Tariffs" (with Todd Allee).
• "Mundane Politics of Trade."
• "Anti-Protection Interests and the Durability of Free Trade" (with Todd Allee).
• "The Cross-Border Spillovers of Sanctions" (with Shannon Carcelli).