research
We are accustomed to seeing the history of our economic activity as a field of pitiless constraint, in which scarcity, need, dependence, and coercion play major roles. From the perspective of the emergence of the knowledge economy, however, economic life has also always been a story of the troubled advance of the imagination. (Roberto Unger, “The Knowledge Economy”)
The past fifty years have seen the rise of a new global economy based on knowledge-intensive production, digitally-enabled services, and intangible forms of capital. But how these transformations have affected processes of economic and political development remain a black box to social scientists. My research sheds light on the causes and consequences of this global knowledge economy, focusing on three areas: (1) the governance foundations of industrial and innovation policy; (2) the social and political effects of post-industrial transitions; and (3) revisiting governance and state capacity using computational-historical methods. While my work is mostly empirical, I retain broad interest in social theory and political methodology.
If you’re interested in these same research themes or would like to see my working papers, I’d be glad to hear from you.
selected working papers
"World Wide Webs: How Migrant Networks and Porous Bureaucracies Forged the Knowledge Economy in the Global South" (Job Market Paper)
A long political economy tradition argues that strong, 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 knowledge economy hubs have been driven by migrant professionals engaging with porous and dispersed bureaucracies. These structures foster bureaucrats’ connectedness to peripheral business networks, allowing policymakers to leverage tacit knowledge held by migrant co-nationals in processes of fine-grained collaboration. I test this argument using the first agency-level datasets of industrial policy bureaucracies covering all GATT/WTO members since 1989, and historical process-tracing of the Philippines’ and Malaysia’s knowledge economy transitions based on 57 elite interviews. My results challenge an influential literature underscoring “Weberian” bureaucracies and hierarchical “developmental states” as prerequisites for industrial policy in the era of knowledge-based capitalism.
"From Precarity to Populism: The Political Economy of Democratic Erosion in the Philippines" (with Enrico Antonio La Viña)
Why have beneficiaries of economic growth booms frequently supported illiberal populists across developing democracies? While existing explanations of democratic backsliding have emphasized the role of disinformation drives and ethnic/identity-based appeals, these accounts struggle to explain why many of the most devoted supporters of illiberal populists in the Global South have come from upwardly-mobile classes that have benefited from accelerated growth and poverty reduction. We argue that premature deindustrialization and the services transition in the Global South have underpinned the expansion of “non-poor yet insecure” working/middle classes that have been less integrated into formal civil society and informal clientelist networks. These process of class formation have, in turn, expanded the feasibility of populist political strategies. Applying Bayesian reasoning to case studies of the rise of Rodrigo Duterte and Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. in the Philippines in 2016 and 2022, we show that such groups were tapped as major constituencies by both presidents in their campaigns, and that a “precarious class” perspective better comports with the dynamics of these voting demographics relative to other explanations of populism. Our argument provides reason for reassessing the scope conditions and mechanisms underlying Lipset’s Law concerning the relationship between economic development and democracy.
"Bayesian Inference and Typological Thinking: Towards a Unified Framework for Qualitative and Computational Research"
Social scientists often update typologies when faced with observations that do not fit existing classification schemes. But the process of establishing such new categories is often undertaken in an ad-hoc manner that is over-fitted to individual observations. I re-purpose recent advances in incorporating Bayesian inference into process-tracing to provide more systematic guidelines for typological classification and updating processes. Specifically, I reframe typological updating as a problem of completing incomplete typologies, for which logical Bayesianism offers two heuristic criteria that are usually conflated by researchers. An unusualness criterion between observed cases and available types helps assess whether formulating a new type is analytically appropriate. An inconsistency criterion aids in adjudicating whether retaining that new type is justified. Beyond providing more safeguards for typological updating processes, grounding typological updating in Bayesian frameworks offers the possibility for a unified framework for inductive inference bridging emerging streams of qualitative and computational social science research.
selected work-in-progress
“The Digital Developmental State” (with Andrew Stokols)
“Social connectedness and political populism: the rise of the American far-right revisited” (with Joohye Jeong)
Mapping the global evolution of industrial policy bureaucracies, 1989-2025
The US tariff data project: American trade politics from 1789-2023 (with In Song Kim and Geondo Kim)
OpenAudit: advancing governance research with LLM-processed audit reports (with Randy Tuaño and Uriel Galace)