Publications

  • Sorting for K-Street: Post-Employment Regulations and Wage Setting in Congress
    Forthcoming at Journal of Politics
    Abstract While post-employment regulations are a common tool to slow the revolving door in government, little is known about their effectiveness and consequences. Using the 2007 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA), I argue that policymakers strategically adjust their behaviors to maintain lucrative career options in the lobbying industry. HLOGA prohibited staffers-turned-lobbyists who earn at least 75% of a Congress member's salary from contacting their ex-employers in Congress for one year. Using data on the complete set of congressional staff (2001-2016), I show that staffers sort below the salary threshold post-HLOGA. Employing various panel data analyses, I also find that selecting out of the regulation increases a staffer's probability to become a lobbyist and ensures a substantial premium in revenues at the beginning of their lobbying career. These results explain why reforms of the revolving door fail and provide insights on institutional determinants of career incentives for non-elected public officials.
    pdf
    replication

  • Multilanguage Word Embeddings for Social Scientists: Estimation, Inference and Validation Resources for 157 Languages
    with Pedro L. Rodriguez, Arthur Spirling, and Brandon M. Stewart
    Conditionally Accepted at Political Analysis
    Abstract Word embeddings are now a vital resource for social science research. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to obtain high quality embeddings for non-English languages, and it may be computational expensive to do so. In addition, social scientists typically want to make statistical comparisons and do hypothesis tests on embeddings, but this is non-trivial with current approaches. We provide three new data resources designed to ameliorate the union of these issues: (1) a new version of fastText model embeddings, fit to Wikipedia corpora; (2) a multi-language "a la carte" (ALC) embedding version of the fastText model fit to Wikipedia corpora; (3) a multi-language ALC embedding version of the well-known GloVe model fit to Wikipedia corpora. These materials are aimed at "low resource" users who lack access to large corpora in their language of interest, or who lack access to the computational resources required to produce high-quality vector representations. We make these resources available for 30 languages, along with a code pipeline for another 127 languages available from Wikipedia corpora. We provide extensive validation of the materials, via reconstruction tests and some translation proofs-of-concept. We also conduct and report on human crowdworker tests, for our embeddings for Arabic, French, (traditional, Mandarin) Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.
    pdf
    resources
    replication

Working Papers

  • Political Power of Bureaucratic Agents: Evidence from Policing in New York City
    Abstract: To what extent can bureaucrats manipulate public service provision for explicitly political ends? A growing body of work highlights the immense ability of bureaucrats to influence governments through campaign contributions, endorsements, collective bargaining, and organized election turnout. I explore a more fundamental mechanism of bureaucratic influence: bureaucrats strategically shirking responsibilities. Politicians depend on bureaucrats to achieve policy goals. This gives the latter leverage over the former. If bureaucrats deviate in their preferences from politicians and are organized in cohesive unions with strong tenure protections, they can collectively reduce effort to exert political pressure. I use data on New York Police Department (NYPD) 911 response times together with council members' preferences on the FY2021 $1 billion cut to the NYPD's budget. Employing difference-in-differences and spatial difference-in-discontinuities designs, I find that police reduced effort in districts of non-aligned politicians by slowing response times. This study informs the theoretical debate on principal-agent relationships in government and highlights the importance of organized political interests to explain policing in US cities.
    pdf

  • Bureaucratic Sabotage and Policy Inefficiency
    with Kun Heo
    Abstract: Poor public service provision creates electoral vulnerability for incumbent politicians. Under what conditions can bureaucrats exploit this to avoid reforms they dislike? We develop a model of political accountability in which a politician must decide whether to enact a reform of uncertain value, and a voter evaluates the incumbent based on government service quality, which anti-reform bureaucrats can sabotage. We find that bureaucratic sabotage leads to two types of policy inefficiency depending on voters' perceptions of the reform's merit. Sabotage either deters politicians from enacting beneficial reforms due to electoral risks (under-reform) or prompts them to implement excessive reforms by providing bureaucrats as a scapegoat (over-reform). This result arises because obfuscation by sabotage affects voter inference differently based on their prior beliefs.
    pdf

  • Diverse Forces? Investigating Determinants of Political Diversity in US Urban Bureaucracy
    Abstract: A rich body of research emphasizes the importance of a representative government for policymaking and public service provision. Yet, recent work on the composition of US bureaucracies reveals significant gaps in the descriptive representation of partisan and racial groups in the bureaucracy and their consequences for service delivery. What drives partisan and racial selection in professionalized bureaucracies? Focusing on selection in New York City's administration, this project addresses the question in three steps. First, I use detailed administrative data on the characteristics of city employees, including their partisanship, race, and gender, to illustrate the representational gaps between local bureaucrats and their constituents. Second, I focus on the New York Police Department (NYPD) and unpack the dynamics of partisan and racial misrepresentation. I find that Republican and White employees are more likely to be hired, promoted, appointed to senior ranks, receive more departmental awards, and have longer tenure than non-White and Democratic officers. Third, I show that the murder of George Floyd substantially increased turnover at the NYPD, especially among White and Republican officers. By delineating the complexities of selection in modern bureaucracies, this study provides new evidence about the determinants of bureaucratic representativeness and behavior.
    pdf

Works in Progress

  • Fiscal Crisis and Gender Pay Gap in the Bureaucracy
    with Hye Young You and Kyuwon Lee
    Abstract: How does a fiscal crisis change the gender pay gap in a bureaucracy? To answer this question, we exploit the sudden budget crisis in Massachusetts (MA) in 2015 and examine how methods that governments employ to downsize their agencies - increasing senior officials' discretion in setting compensation and adopting individualized negotiations - have unequal impacts on government employees. Using 1.4 million observations of detailed individual-level data about public employees in the MA state government for the period 2010-2020, we find that the fiscal crisis increased the gender pay gap in executive agencies by 2.4 percentage points. Consequently, women earned significantly less than their comparable male counter-parts after the fiscal crisis. We also find that there is significant variation in the gender pay gap: women in more senior positions and women who work in agencies with smaller shares of female employees (public safety and transportation) experienced the largest gender pay gap.

Pre-PhD

  • The Revolving Door for Political Elites: Policymakers' Professional Background and Financial Regulation
    EBRD Working Paper
    pdf
    Abstract Regulatory capture of public policy by financial entities, especially via the revolving door between government and financial services, has increasingly become a subject of intense public scrutiny. This paper empirically analyses the relation between public-private career crossovers of high-ranking government officials and financial policy. Using curriculum vitae of more than 400 central bank governors and finance ministers from 32 OECD countries between 1973 and 2005, I compile a new dataset including details on officials’ professional careers before and after their tenure and data on financial regulation. Panel data analyses show that central bank governors with past experience in the financial sector deregulate significantly more than governors without a background in finance (career socialisation hypothesis). Using linear probability regressions, the results also indicate that finance ministers, especially from left-wing parties, are more likely to be hired by financial entities in the future if they please their future employers through deregulatory policies during their time in office (career concerns hypothesis). Thus, although the revolving door effects differ between government officials, this study shows that career paths and career concerns of policymakers should be taken into account when analysing financial policy outcomes.

  • Daylight saving all year round? Evidence from a national experiment
    with Cagatay Bircan, Energy Economics (2023)
    pdf
    Abstract We study the effects of staying on daylight saving time (DST) permanently on electricity consumption, generation, and emissions. In October 2016, Turkey chose to stay on DST all year round. Employing alternative identification methods, we find a negligible overall impact on consumption. However, the policy has a strong intra-day distributional effect, increasing consumption in the early morning and reducing it in the late afternoon. This change in the load shape reduced generation by dirtier fossil fuel plants and increased it by cleaner renewable sources that can more easily satisfy peak load generation. Emissions from generation decreased as a result. A large presence of hydropower, which is a reliable provider of energy to the grid in peak times, was crucial to achieve this reduction.

  • Skills, employment and automation
    with Cevat Giray Aksoy, Yvonne Giesing and Nadzeya Laurentsyeva, 2018/19 EBRD Transition Report
    pdf
    Abstract Over the past 25 years, the economies of the EBRD regions have created an average of 1.5 million jobs per year. However, the nature of work is changing, with automation on the rise. Many economies where the EBRD invests have experienced deindustrialisation, as well as the polarisation of employment – a decline in the number of medium-skilled jobs. While technological change is resulting in increased demand for skilled labour, many of these economies face significant gaps in terms of the quality of education, as well as substantial emigration by skilled workers. In the short term, the emigration of skilled workers reduces the productivity of fi rms in the country of origin. In the longer term, however, emigration has boosted the transfer of knowledge to the EBRD regions and supported innovation.