Paper

How do unequal capacities for adaption shape the distribution consequences and political legitimacy of welfare reform in weak-capacity, oil-producing states? This paper examines Nigeria's 2023 fuel subsidy removal, a policy justified on fiscal grounds but implemented amid widespread energy poverty. Using two waves of the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study, Afrobarometer survey data, and 250 household interviews, I find that the subsidy removal produced more regressive outcomes than the policy it replaced. The reform drove petrol prices from N200 to N1,250 per liter, making solar energy cost-competitive but requiring prohibitive upfront capital of N2 million or more. Wealthier households adopted solar at substantially higher rates and partially escaped energy poverty. Poorer households curtailed energy consumption entirely, experiencing welfare losses without compensating gains. I theorize this as stratified adaptation, a process through which pre-existing inequalities in financial resources and infrastructure access determine both material and political effects of reform. This material stratification translated directly into legitimacy erosion: citizens unable to adapt interpreted the reform as state abandonment and systematically withdrew support from government institutions. Because adaptive capacity follows existing wealth hierarchies, subsidy removal reproduced inequality in both material outcomes and political trust, illustrating how reform outcomes are conditioned by prior distributions of advantage.

Market interventions are a frequent lever for governments to ease the costs of economic transformations. Green industrial policy (GIP) is a recent example of such policy, seeking to ease the costs of the ecological transition. It is an open question, however, if governments benefit from the provision of GIP. My central claim is that rather than GIP being a tool against climate change alone, it is better considered as one against deindustrialization. This broader conceptualization provides insights into the spatial variation of GIP's electoral consequences: GIP is more likely to win the incumbent votes in places with increased risk and exposure to deindustrialization, namely along the dimensions of globalization and decarbonization. Hence in communities doubly-pressured by both dimensions, GIP implementation is an effective tool to win back voters "left-behind" and at risk of further economic precarity. I test this argument using geo-located data from the Inflation Reduction Act, leveraging variation in investment status in November 2024 for identification in a difference-in-differences framework. The absence of general electoral impact masks substantial heterogeneity: doubly-pressured communities shifted 2-3 p.p. towards the Democrats after receiving investment. I complement these national level results with a case study of Michigan. Fine grained voting data, planning documents, candidate statements, and local news coverage corroborate the differential response to GIP in these doubly-pressured areas, but not elsewhere.

How do electorates react to trade liberalization? I argue that liberalization offers domestic producers access to new, cheaper, and better inputs. This in turn increases real incomes, leading to electoral rewards. I test this hypothesis in the context of the 1991 trade reforms imposed by the IMF on India, which I argue constitute a natural experiment to determine the effects of tariff reduction. I create novel measures of region-specific exposure to tariff changes and use a difference-in-difference design to find that greater access to better inputs is spatially associated with greater support for the pro-reform incumbent.

After the Bretton Woods, the US Financial hegemony has shown a complex evolution rooted in structural power and market power, and is undergoing a brand-new digital-fintech-driven evolution. The paper innovatively integrates reduced-form regressions and Bayesian structural vector autoregressions to identify potential transformative digital forces that could affect the international monetary order and the US financial hegemony. The empirical results indicate that US-dollar-backed Bitcoin is promisingly possible to exert a significant positive effect on the dollar index DXY in the near future, as most Markov Chain Monte Carlo draws of the 95% credible interval of the impulse response are positive. It further accredits the main long-term driving factor on Bitcoin to stablecoin supply at the 95% credible level and then jointly reveals the logic that the self-reinforcement cycle from dollar to stablecoin to Bitcoin finally back to dollar is playing a role in bolstering the global dominance of the dollar in the international monetary order.

A long political economy tradition argues that centralized states deploying concerted industrial policies are crucial for developing productive industries. Yet developing countries that have emerged as major exporters of knowledge-based services (e.g. software/ R&D / AI services) have often lacked these state structures. I advance a new theory of how the rise of these services-exporting hubs have driven by skilled migrant networks engaging with porous and dispersed bureaucracies. These structures foster bureaucrats' connectedness to peripheral entrepreneurial networks, allowing policymakers to leverage distributed tacit knowledge held by migrant co-nationals in processes of fine-grained collaboration. I test this argument using first-ever, agency-level datasets of industrial policy bureaucracies covering all GATT/WTO members since 1989, and historical process-tracing of the Phillipines' and Malaysia's diverging knowledge economy transitions based on 50 elite interviews. My results challenge a vast literature underscoring "Weberian" bureaucracies and autonomous "developmental states" as prerequisites for structural transformation in the era of knowledge-based capitalism.

When do people choose formal financial services and when do they instead exit `a la Hirschman (1970) using cash or Bitcoin? Despite financial technologies' (fintech) growth, citizens are still bypassing traditional institutions: cash remains sticky worldwide and Bitcoin adoption is increasing. I refer to this phenomenon as financial disintermediation, distinguishing between intermediated fintech (mobile banking) that relies on trusted third parties and disintermediated alternatives (peer-topeer Bitcoin, cash) that operate without central authorities and protect anonymity. Extending Hirschman's "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" framework to finance, I argue that payment choices reflect political preferences rather than economic efficiency alone. My research reveals that autocratic governance increases citizens' "exit" from formal financial systems. Citizens in these contexts either distrust institutions or fear them, resulting in exit through disintermediated alternatives. I test this theory using cash dependency (167 countries, 2001-2020) and Bitcoin peer-to-peer transactions (143 countries, 2020). My findings confirm that financial disintermediation is systematically prevalent in autocratic contexts. This work contributes by bringing individual agency back into financial intermediation debates, extending Hirschman's framework to finance, and providing the first systematic evidence linking autocratic governance to payment preferences.