Hello! I am a PhD student in Economics at Harvard. My current research interests include political economy, artificial intelligence, and development. I am also a affiliate at the Center for American Political Studies. I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2020 with a BS in computational and applied math and a BA in economics. My CV is located here.
Research
Publications
- “AI-tocracy” with Martin Beraja, David Yang, and Noam Yuchtman — Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2023
Recent scholarship has suggested that artificial intelligence technology and autocratic regimes may be mutually reinforcing. We test for such a mutually reinforcing relationship in the context of facial recognition AI in China. To do so, we gather comprehensive data on AI firms and government procurement contracts, as well as on social unrest across China during the last decade. We first show that autocrats benefit from AI: local unrest leads to greater government procurement of facial recognition AI as a new technology of political control, and increased AI procurement indeed suppresses subsequent unrest. We then show that AI innovation benefits from autocrats’ suppression of unrest: the contracted AI firms innovate more both for the government and commercial markets, and are more likely to export their products; and non-contracted AI firms do not experience detectable negative spillovers. Taken together, these results suggest the possibility of sustained AI innovation under the Chinese regime: AI innovation entrenches the regime, and the regime’s investment in AI for political control stimulates further frontier innovation.
Working papers
- “Exporting the Surveillance State via Trade in AI” with Martin Beraja, David Yang, and Noam Yuchtman
We document three facts about the global diffusion of surveillance AI technology, and in particular, the role played by China. First, China has a comparative advantage in this technology. It is substantially more likely to export surveillance AI than other countries, and particularly so as compared to other frontier technologies. Second, autocracies and weak democracies are more likely to import surveillance AI from China. This bias is not observed in AI imports from the US or in imports of other frontier technologies from China. Third, autocracies and weak democracies are especially more likely to import China’s surveillance AI in years of domestic unrest. Such imports coincide with declines in domestic institutional quality more broadly. To the extent that China may be exporting its surveillance state via trade in AI, this can enhance and beget more autocracies abroad. This possibility challenges the view that economic integration is necessarily associated with the diffusion of liberal institutions.
- “Protests” with Davide Cantoni, David Yang, and Noam Yuchtman
Citizens have long taken to the streets to demand change, expressing political views that may otherwise be suppressed. Protests have produced change at local, national, and international scales, including spectacular moments of political and social transformation. We document five new empirical patterns describing 1.2 million protest events across 218 countries between 1980 and 2020. First, autocracies and weak democracies experienced a trend break in protests during the Arab Spring. Second, protest movements also rose in importance following the Arab Spring. Third, protest movements geographically diffuse over time, spiking to their peak, before falling off. Fourth, a country’s year-to-year economic performance is not strongly correlated with protests; individual values are predictive of protest participation. Fifth, the US, China, and Russia are the most over-represented countries by their share of academic studies. We discuss each pattern’s connections to the existing literature and anticipate paths for future work.
Works in progress
Policy Articles
- “Autocratic AI dystopias: From science fiction to social science fact” with Martin Beraja, David Yang, and Noam Yuchtman. VoxDev column (May 2023)
- “Autocratic AI dystopias: From science fiction to social science fact” with Martin Beraja, David Yang, and Noam Yuchtman. VoxEU column (December 2021)
