Mary Beth and Chris Gordon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Inequality
Department of Economics, Harvard University
Research affiliation: Center for Race, Inequality and Social Equity Studies (CRISES)
Ph.D. in Economics, Boston University, 2026 2026–27 Job Market
How do existing institutions shape responses to change?
I work at the intersection of economic history and political economy. I develop new ways to model and measure mechanisms that are difficult to observe directly, and examine their consequences.
My completed work examines resistance to reform and the evolution of political movements. Current projects explore migration and mobility, climate adaptation, and insurance markets.
What Killed the ERA? The Role of Entrepreneurs in the Marketplace of Ideas and Policy
Paper Online Appendix
How does opposition emerge after a reform appears politically settled? I show how Phyllis Schlafly used mass media to turn latent institutional stakes into organized resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment.
A Choice, Not an Echo: A Theory of Cultural Matching in the Marketplace of Ideas and Policy
Paper Online Appendix
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
Paper Online Appendix
Better physics can change a result without making it more causal. In a controlled simulation, a terrain-based reconstruction recovers 0.873 when the ground-wave model generates one; historically, the U.S. association reverses while German vote estimates barely move.
A Republic, Not a Democracy: The John Birch Society and the Geography of the American Right
Paper Online Appendix
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.
Research note From Laetrile to Ivermectin?
China’s Many Starting Lines: Migration Histories and the Measurement of Intergenerational Mobility
What if we are measuring immigrant mobility from the wrong starting line? I trace Chinese families across origin, migration, and the next generation to recover the economic transformations that happen before U.S. data ever begin observing them.
Protected by Place, Constrained by Climate: Climate Adaptation When Production Is Tied to Place
What happens when the place that makes a product valuable becomes the reason it cannot adapt? I study how Europe’s geographically protected producers respond when climate change puts the rules of scarcity themselves under pressure.
The Insurability Trap: Liability and Learning
Can liability prevent the experience needed to make a technology insurable? I model how insurance capacity and setup costs can block deployment and learning, when temporary risk sharing can lead to lasting private coverage, and when outside evidence allows markets to form without support.