Paper

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.