Research theme: Spatially Uneven Economic Growth and its Implications on Political Behavior and Policy Responses
I am assistant professor at Waseda University, Faculty of Political Science and Economics. Previously I was Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. I received Ph.D. in Political Science from University of California, Berkeley in May 2021.
My main research field is comparative politics and political economy, but my research also speaks to public policy, political behavior, international political economy, urban politics, intergovernmental politics, federalism, and business and politics. I pay particular attention to “left-behind areas” in advanced economies.
I was visiting scholar at the Uppsala University, the University of Vienna, the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and the University of Luxembourg.
I was selected as the Kirk-Underfill Fellow of the Anglo-American Studies by the Berkeley Law School, and the Austrian Marshall Fund fellow by the Austrian Ministry of Education, both for my research on the Economic Geography and Politics of Populism.
Papers
Biting the Hands that Feed Them? Place-Based Policies and Decline of Local Support: Evidence from the EU funding schemes in the UK
Do people really appreciate “pork”? Exploiting the formulaic and discontinuous assignment of the EU regional development funding in the UK, I applied the Geographic RD and compared the survey respondents in the well-funded regions and those who did not receive a lot. The results showed that highly informed and relatively educated people have negative opinions of the EU after their region received the EU received regional development programs.
I geocoded all the major projects and confirmed the tendency with the Genetic Matching algorithm, two-stage least squared analysis, and difference-in-differences.
Choosing Voters? Partisan Sorting of Voters Following Close Subnational Elections in France
Can mayors attract their likely supporters? Using the original datasets of French local elections and local policies, I applied RDD on a large mobility census with 19 million samples. I demonstrated that closely-elected Right mayors tend to attract recent retirees, who tend to support the Right. I observed the corresponding partisan changes in the property tax rate and social housing construction.
Power of Immobility: Underrepresentation of Geographically Mobile Voters and its Consequences
Are geographically mobile voters less likely to participate in politics? Applying the Genetic Matching algorithm to the panel data from the UK, Sweden, and the United States, I revealed that not only the aftermath of moving but also before the moving, people are less likely to vote or get contacted. The willingness to move was also correlated with lower political participation. However, mobile voters are no less knowledgeable or motivated than otherwise comparable stationary voters.
Using the land-regulation data in the US and the project permission data in the UK, I also revealed that local authorities with higher-level or resident turnovers tend to have more restricted zoning. I used convoluted borders as an instrumental variable to deal with endogeneity concerns.