I'm a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Boston University. My research is in economic history and political economy, with secondary interests in gender economics and media economics. I will be on the job market in 2026-2027.
Beginning in August 2026, I will be the Mary Beth and Chris Gordon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Inequality in the Department of Economics at Harvard University.
My work studies how social and cultural entrepreneurs, media, and organizational infrastructure shape public opinion, legislative behavior, and political mobilization.
CV hongxi@bu.edu
What Killed the ERA? The Role of Entrepreneurs in the Marketplace of Ideas and Policy
FM moved votes. Television moved language. Using the physics of broadcast reception, I show how Phyllis Schlafly’s CBS platform reshaped the political fight over the ERA.
A Choice, Not an Echo: A Theory of Cultural Matching in the Marketplace of Ideas and Policy
Why can people sincerely endorse a principle yet oppose a reform meant to advance it? Institutions can make particular ways of living valuable, creating stakes in their own persistence; entrepreneurs give those stakes a language.
Grounded: Radio Propagation, Soil Geochemistry, and Political AM Radio
Better physics can change an empirical result without making it more causal. Rebuilding 1930s AM reception with ground-wave propagation overturns the U.S. association while leaving the identification problem intact.
A Republic, Not a Democracy: The John Birch Society and the Geography of the American Right
The John Birch Society left behind a map. Forty years later, that map looks less like a genealogy of Trumpism than a record of how a movement disappeared into the Republican Party.