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 governance and global 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 theories of governance and globalization 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.
book project
"World Wide Webs: How Migrant Networks and Porous Bureaucracies Forged the Knowledge Economy in the Global South"
A long political economy tradition argues that strong, centralized “developmental states” deploying concerted industrial policies are a precondition for developing more productive industries (Johnson 1982; Evans 1995). Yet emerging economies as diverse as Argentina, China, India, the Philippines, and Romania that have emerged as major exporters of knowledge-based services (e.g. software, AI, R&D services) have usually lacked these state structures, in addition to pro-investor institutions. If not strong states or pro-market policies, then what governance arrangements explain why some economies have emerged as globalized technology hubs, whereas others have not?
In this book, I advance a new theory of how the rise of these knowledge economies have been driven by migrant professionals engaging with porous, non-autonomous bureaucracies. Migrant professional networks drive these shifts due to their having tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1966) for high-tech services production, as well as bridging social ties (Putnam, 2015) between their home countries and clients in globalized industries. Porous bureaucracies, which blur the boundaries between the public and private sectors and cede policy-making authority to industry, strengthen the connectedness of bureaucrats to these decentralized networks and facilitate fine-grained collaboration between industrial policy-makers and migrant professionals in them.
I test this theory with a four-part strategy combining quantitative, qualitative, and computational methods. Cross-nationally, I develop the first agency-level dataset of industrial policy bureaucracies covering all GATT/WTO members from 1989 onwards by applying open-source large-language models to nearly 2.1 million paragraphs of historical GATT/WTO reports. These new datasets draw attention for the first time to the underappreciated role of non-state agencies in implementing industrial policy worldwide. Using these datasets in an instrumental variable design, I find that bureaucratic porousness decisively influenced the relationship between developing countries’ skilled migrant stocks with their IT services export performance after the Y2K crisis of 2000, as well as their earlier adoption of tailored industrial policies. Without porous structures, skilled migration stocks were negatively related to knowledge services export outcomes; yet more porous industrial policy agencies reversed these relationships into positive ones. I yield similar patterns in an analysis of the subnational implementation of Mexico’s PROSOFT industrial policy for its software sector from 2004 to 2019.
To probe the mechanisms for these results, I process-trace the Philippines’, Malaysia’s, and Mexico's diverging knowledge economy transitions based on archival research and 88 elite interviews. Consistent with my theory, I find that the Philippines’ emergence as the world’s "business process outsourcing" capital was driven by a critical mass of returnees engaging in fine-grained policy collaboration in agencies with porous boundaries, outsourced policy functions, and leadership by industry veterans. Meanwhile, despite its highly-ambitious Multimedia Super Corridor Project, Malaysia’s knowledge economy transition underperformed due to the exclusion of its skilled diaspora and its closed, if technocratic, industrial policy framework. And while Mexico hosted growing numbers of skilled returnees in the 1990s, migrant-policymaker collaboration was stifled by the country’s closed and centralized bureaucracies, showcased by the dominance of camarilla-based "technobureaucrats" and big business monopolies over its IT sector. Nonetheless, in subnational zones such as Mexico’s Jalisco state where smaller industry players successfully established more porous industrial policy entities, migrant-policymaker collaboration thrived, transforming the region into one of Latin America’s leading technology hubs.
Together, my findings challenge an influential literature underscoring autonomous bureaucracies and hierarchical "developmental states" as prerequisites for industrial policy in the global knowledge-based economy, while showing how skilled migration has shaped contemporary patterns of global trade and technology competition through its linkages with industrial policy development and implementation. Moreover, by focusing on both migrant networks and porous bureaucracies as catalysts of these knowledge economy transitions, I point to decentralized social networks as governance alternatives to strong states and autonomous bureaucracies under conditions where heightened information capacity constraints impede state-directed approaches to policy-making and implementation.
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 59 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 Illiberalism: The Political Economy of Democratic Erosion in the Philippines" (with Enrico Antonio La Viña)
Why have beneficiaries of economic booms frequently supported illiberal leaders in developing democracies? While past explanations of populism have emphasized the role of disinformation and ethnic/identity-based appeals, these accounts struggle to explain why core supporters of illiberal leaders in the Global South have often come from upwardly-mobile classes that have benefited from accelerated growth and poverty reduction. We argue that the services transition in the Global South has underpinned the expansion of ``non-poor yet insecure'' working/middle classes that are less integrated into formal civil society and informal clientelist networks. These process have, in turn, expanded the feasibility of illiberal-populist political strategies. Through mixed-method case studies of the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte and Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. 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. Our argument provides reason for reassessing the scope conditions underlying Lipset’s Law on the relationship between economic development and democracy.
"Bayesian inference and typological thinking: an integrated framework for typological & 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 abductive and Bayesian reasoning in iterative research to provide more systematic guidelines for typological updating processes. Specifically, I reframe typological updating as a problem of completing incomplete typologies, for which abductive and Bayesian reasoning represent complementary approaches to updating that are often conflated by researchers. Abduction addresses questions of whether and on what typological dimensions formulating new types is analytically appropriate. Bayesian reasoning aids in adjudicating whether retaining proposed new types is justified. Beyond providing more safeguards for typological updating processes, grounding typological updating in these frameworks offers the possibility for a integrated framework for iterative research bridging emerging streams of typological 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)