Conference Participants

Scott Abramson	Scott Abramson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Rochester. He was previously a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He received his PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University in 2015. He will be on leave at the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice AY 2018-19.
Avi Acharya	Avidit (Avi) Acharya is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford. He is a formal political theorist and political economist whose work ranges across a diverse set of topics including voting theory, bargaining theory, principal-agent theory, behavioral political economy, distributive politics, and long run development. Avi’s papers have been published (or are forthcoming) in the leading journals of political science, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics, as well as the top journals in economic theory, including Econometrica, Journal of Economic Theory, and Games and Economic Behavior.
Deborah Beim	Deborah Beim is an assistant professor in the political science department at Yale University. She studies American political institutions in general and American courts in particular. She has written about the informational value of dissenting opinions, the role of lower federal courts in doctrinal development, and intercircuit splits. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the Journal of Law and Courts.
Caterina Chiopris	Caterina Chiopris is a Ph.D. student in Political Economy and Government at Harvard University, and holds a master’s degree in Analytical Political Economy from Duke University. Her research interests include judicial politics and political economy of inequality, with a focus on advanced democracies.
Ali Cirone	Alexandra (Ali) Cirone is an assistant professor in the Government department at Cornell University. Her research interests center on historical political economy, democratization, and multi-level governance in European politics. Her work on lottery-based procedures in parliaments was recently published in the Journal of Politics. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia, and an A.B. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, and was formerly a research fellow at the LSE, in the political economy group.
Brendan Cooley	Brendan Cooley is a Ph.D. candidate in Politics at Princeton University and a graduate student fellow in the Program for Quantitative and Analytical Political Science (Q-APS). He studies the relationship between international economics and militarized conflict, in particular how military coercion affects trade policy. Before coming to Princeton he worked at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C. and studied political science and peace, war, & defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ana De La O
Alexandre Debs	Alexandre Debs is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His research focuses on the causes of war, nuclear proliferation, and democratization. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Annual Review of Political Science, International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, among other outlets. He is the author of the book Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of Proliferation (with Nuno Monteiro), published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.
Torun Dewan	Torun Dewan is Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and is Director of the Political Science and Political Economy Research Group at LSE. He is coeditor of the Journal of Theoretical Politics. His work applies theory to questions in comparative politics. He has worked on political leadership, party factionalism, ministerial turnover and cabinet governance, and electoral accountability.
Tiberiu Dragu	Tiberiu Dragu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University. His research focuses on political institutions, particularly in relation to questions of how to structure and constrain government power in both democratic and non-democratic countries. He specializes in positive political theory and applications of game-theoretic models to studying terrorism and crisis prevention, elections and representation, checks-and-balances institutions, and how to curb political violence and repression. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others.
James Fearon	James D. Fearon is Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research has focused primarily on political violence, and in particular on civil and interstate war. He has also published on the theory of democracy, foreign aid and institution building, post-conflict reconstruction, and international peacekeeping operations. Fearon is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2012) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002), and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a Program Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. From 2007 to 2010 he served as Chair of the Department of Political Science at Stanford.
Scott Gehlbach	Scott Gehlbach is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A political economist and comparativist, Gehlbach’s work is motivated by the contemporary and historical experience of Russia, Ukraine, and other postcommunist states. He has made numerous contributions to the study of autocracy, economic reform, political connections, and other topics in political economy. Known for employing a wide range of methods in his research, Gehlbach has contributed to graduate education through his widely used textbook Formal Models of Domestic Politics. Among other contributions to the discipline, he serves as an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science.
Soeren Henn	Soeren Henn is a PhD Candidate in Political Economy and Government at Harvard University. His jobmarket paper studies the interaction of traditional leaders and the state in Sub-Saharan Africa. His dissertation is part of a broader research agenda at the intersection of comparative politics and political economy. He studies the politics of development with a focus on fragile state settings, informal institutions, and conflict. Using a range of methods, from field and natural experiments to qualitative interviews his research aims to address the overarching questions of what characterizes governance in fragile states and how it might be improved.
John Huber	John Huber teaches and conducts research with a focus on the comparative study of democratic processes. He recently published Exclusion by Elections: Inequality, Ethnic Identity and Democracy, which develops a theory about how inequality can foster identity politics, which can then limit the propensity of a democracy to respond to inequality. In addition to numerous articles, he previously published Rationalizing Parliament: Legislative Institutions and Party Politics in France, and Deliberate Discretion? Institutional Foundations of Bureaucratic Autonomy (with Charles Shipan). His current projects focus on bureaucracy, civil war and inter-generational solidarity.
Colin Krainin	Colin Krainin is an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on game theory and international security. His published work includes “Multilateral War Bargaining” (Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2014), “War and Stability in Dynamic International Systems” (Journal of Politics, 2016), “Preventive War as a Result of Long-Term Shifts in Power” (Political Science Research and Methods, 2017), and “Bargaining with a Biased Autocrat” (Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2017).
Dorothy Kronick	Dorothy Kronick is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies Latin American political economy, focusing on Venezuela and the politics of violent crime. Dorothy completed her PhD at Stanford University in 2016. Prior to her doctoral studies at Stanford, Dorothy lived in Caracas as a Fulbright Scholar. Her writing on Venezuelan politics has been published in The New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, The New Republic, the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, Prodavinci, and Caracas Chronicles, among other outlets.
Horacio Larreguy	Horacio Larreguy received his PhD in Economics from the MIT in 2013 and is an Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University. He works on clientelism and vote buying, the importance of information for political accountability, and where education fosters political participation. His work is mostly in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa and his methodological focus on causal identification using both observational and experimental data. He has conducted large-scale experiments in Liberia, Mexico, Senegal and Uganda. Horacio has published work in leading economics and political science journals and has served as a consultant for USAID.
Sergio Montero	Sergio Montero received his PhD in Social Science from Caltech in 2016 and is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and (by courtesy) Economics at the University of Rochester. His research lies at the intersection of political economy and comparative politics, with a special focus on democratization and party strategy in elections. Methodologically, his work primarily relies on structural modeling and estimation.
Rebecca Morton	Rebecca Morton’s research focuses on voting processes as well as experimental methods. She is the author or co-author of four books and numerous journal articles, which have appeared in noted outlets such as the American Economic Review, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Politics, and Review of Economic Studies.
Monika Nalepa	Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has published her research in the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, and Decyzje.
Benjamin Ogden	Benjamin Odgen is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science department at Texas A&M University. His work is in formal theory, with a particular interest in its applications to voting and information. He researches the impact which uncertainty, and the subjective beliefs which emerge from it, has on coordination and accountability within political and public institutions. More generally, he analyzes the robustness of these institutions to differing assumptions concerning human behavior that have been noted in the empirical literature. He also works at the intersection of political theory and formal theory, using models to push forward our understanding of political institutions. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University, and a B.A. in Economics and Government from Colby College. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES) at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).
Gerard Padro-i-Miquel
Jack Paine	Jack is an assistant professor of political science at University of Rochester. His research intersects applied game theory, comparative politics, and international relations. Applied game theory articles and papers address why authoritarian governments often pursue strategic actions that make civil war more likely. The main application is to explain the conflict resource curse. A series of articles using conflict bargaining models explain why higher national-level oil wealth decreases prospects for center-seeking civil wars but, conversely, why oil-rich regions fight separatist civil wars relatively frequently. Related projects present game theoretic models of authoritarian survival and state-building strategies. A second set of articles and papers, mainly empirical, examine historical causes of wars and democracy.
Mattias Polborn	Mattias Polborn’s research interests lie in political economy and American Politics. He is particularly interested in understanding candidate competition in elections and political polarization. His research has been published in some of the leading journals in both economics and political science (including the American Economic Review, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, and the Journal of Politics).A native of Germany, Polborn graduated in 1998 with a Ph.D. from the University of Munich and has been on faculty at the University of Western Ontario and at the University of Illinois. He joined Vanderbilt University in 2016.
Carlo Prato	Carlo Prato is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Previously, he was an assistant professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and in 2015-2016, he was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He holds a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. His research studies how electoral and legislative institutions affect policy-making, and the accountability and selection of elected representatives. He is a co-founder of the Washington PECO, a DC-area conference in political economy.
Kristopher Ramsay	Kris Ramsay is a professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton . He specializes in strategic analysis and its applications to violent conflict, war, and political economy. Kris is the Director of the Graduate Program in Political Economy, Director of the Emerging Scholars in Political Science Program, and an executive committee member of the Program for Quantitative and Analytical Political Science (Q-APS).
John Roemer	John E. Roemer is the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. His work concerns questions at the intersection of political economy, political philosophy and economic theory. Book titles include A general theory of exploitation and class (1982), A future for socialism (1994), Theories of distributive justice (1996), Political Competition (2001); Racism, Xenophobia and Distribution (2007) and Sustainability for a warming planet (2015). Current interests include constructing micro-foundations for human cooperation, a topic that has been unjustly ignored by economic theory, despite its extreme importance in explaining the success of the human species (How we do and could cooperate: A Kantian explanation). He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, a past Russell Sage and Guggenheim Fellow, and holds doctorates honoris causa from the University of Athens and Queen Mary University of London. He is a past president of Society for Social Choice & W elfare.
B. Peter Rosendorff	B. Peter Rosendorff is Professor of Politics at New York University and editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Economics and Politics, and on the editorial boards of International Organization, American Journal of Political Science and Review of International Organizations. He has also served on the editorial boards of International Interactions and Journal of Politics. Previously, he was Director of the Center for International Studies and Associate Professor of International Relations and Economics at the University of Southern California. Research interests include transparency, trade and investment, and human rights. His research has been published in American Political Science Review, American Economics Review, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and International Organization, among others. His latest book, Information, Democracy and Autocracy: Economic Transparency and Political (In)Stability is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2018.
Emily Sellars	Emily A. Sellars is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. joint in political science and agricultural and applied economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Prior to coming to Yale, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago and an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. Her research interests are at the intersection of comparative political economy, development economics, and economic history.
Alastair Smith	Alastair Smith is the Bernhardt Denmark Chair of International Affairs at New York University. He is the author of 50 journal articles and five books, including The Dictator’s Handbook, Punishing the Prince and The Logic of Political Survival.He utilizes advanced game theoretic and statistical techniques to research the interface between international relations and comparative politics on a range of substantive topics. Much of his recent research focuses on the survival incentives of political leaders, the policies they pursue and what determines whether they succeed. He has a particular interest in how dictators, such as North Korea’s Kim Jung-un, survive. In related work, he studies the impact of the turnover of political leaders on relations between nations.
Milan Svolik	Milan Svolik is a professor of political science at Yale University. His research and teaching focus on comparative politics, political economy, and formal political theory. Svolik has authored and co-authored articles on the politics of authoritarian regimes and democratization in leading political science journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. He is the author of The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which received the best book award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association.
Hans Tung	Hans H. Tung is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and a faculty associate of the Center for Research in Econometric Theory and Applications (CRETA) at National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University. He is primarily interested in the formal and empirical analysis of the politics of economic policymaking. His forthcoming book, The Dictator’s Growth Curse (2018), develops a dynamic theory of authoritarian institutional change in the context of post-reform China. A second strand of his research explores individuals’ political-economic decision-making through neuroscientific experiments. One ongoing project investigates both behaviorally and neuroscientifically how individuals’ perceptions about the structure of inequality affect their levels of contributions in a public-goods game context.
Richard Van Weelden	Richard Van Weelden is an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD in economics from Yale University in 2010 and previously taught at the University of Chicago. His research applies game theoretic models to study political institutions and American politics. Recent papers have explored the benefits and costs of electoral accountability, the determinants of incumbency (dis)advantage, the incentives for political ambiguity, the informativeness of campaign promises, and the role of primaries and outsider candidates. His research has been published in the Review of Economic Studies, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Journal of Public Economics, and the Quarterly Journal of Political Science.
Fabrizio Zilibotti	Fabrizio Zilibotti is Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and a co-director of the NBER Economic Fluctuations Group on Income Distribution and Macroeconomics. He was the President of the European Economic Association in 2016. He is a recipient of the Yrjö Jahnsson 2009 award (the European analogue of the John Bates Clark medal, assigned to the best economist in Europe under 45) and of the Sun Yefang 2012 Award from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for his article “Growing Like China.” He is a co-editor of Econometrica. His research interests include economic growth and development, political economy, macroeconomics, and the economic development of China. He has published in several journals, among them American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies.