Working Papers

• The Madman Choice: Delegation in Reputational Bargaining [Abstract]
  How does the choice of delegation to obstinate behavioral agents affect the outcome of reputational bargaining? I develop a model of reputational bargaining with delegation that endogenizes the choice of strategic obstinacy of agents. Two principals bargain by choosing agents on behalf of themselves who may be rational or obstinate. Rational agents choose demands strategically while obstinate agents are committed to fixed demands and never accept less. Rational agents have an incentive to imitate obstinate behavioral types to benefit from a “tough” reputation against their rational opponents and convince them to concede. Delegation triggers a tradeoff between the desire to force the opponent to concede and the danger of being locked in a stalemate. I characterize the equilibria of this game. Relative to the existing literature with exogenous commitment types where the prior probability is small, delegation effects emerge: the principals are more likely to appoint extreme rational and obstinate agents compared with moderate obstinate agents in mixed strategies, resulting in a polarized delegation pattern that also entails inefficiency.
• Voting and Communicating on Trade: How Local Trade Shocks Influence Legislators’ Positions (with Sayumi Miyano) [Abstract]
  When legislators face conflicting interests on trade issues, for example between the protectionist constituency and party ideology or business interests, how do they cast congressional votes and communicate their position to their constituencies? We argue that while legislators face constraints on their votes from their partisanship and other interests, they could also use press releases as a means to signal their preference on trade policy to its constituents. Legislators in affected districts, torn between the motive to vote for free trade and the motive to convey a protectionist and/or job-protecting attitude to the constituency, tend to communicate certain messages as they cast free-trade votes. By analyzing the legislators' press releases on trade issues, we find support for our hypothesis that legislators from highly affected areas are more likely to refer to certain topics on trade, such as unfair trade with China and the benefits of job assistance programs. Additionally, We propose a multimodal model to detect incongruent patterns between legislators' votes and public statements. Our findings suggest that Republicans representing districts adversely affected by trade shocks tend to exhibit greater inconsistency between their voting records and their public statements on trade issues.
• AdroitRA: A Deep Learning Model for Information Extraction (with Haosen Ge) [Abstract]
  For social science research, high-quality text data has become an important data source. However, the time-consuming process of extracting information from documents often makes using text for theory development and empirical testing too expensive for researchers. The AdroitRA model, which uses state-of-the-art technology from deep neural network research, is a low-cost, semi-automated al- ternative to human coding. Our model allows researchers to extract information from documents using query-formulation and question-asking. We also present an adversarial-network-based active learning approach for improving the model’s performance across diverse corpus domains. The model performance is evalu- ated using three popular and challenging databases: SQuAD 2.0, NewsQA, and MASH-QA. The results demonstrate our model’s effectiveness and versatility. Lastly, we apply our model to U.S. firms’ annual reports from which we extract informa- tion about regulatory barriers faced by firms. We believe that our method helps open up new avenues for future research by lowering the cost of extracting infor- mation from documents.
• Transformer Encoder for Social Science (with Haosen Ge et al) [PDF]
• From Visibility to Shadows: The Impact of Police Discretion on Prostitution in Response to Legal Changes (with Yutian An et al) [PDF]

Work in Progress

• Reputational Bargaining with Investing in Outside Options
• Electoral Accountability and Media Bias (with Liqun Liu)

• Quantitative Analysis I (G)
  • Teaching Assistant for Rocío Titiunik
• Quantitative Analysis III (G)
  • Teaching Assistant for Marc Ratkovic
• Introduction to Quantitative Social Science (UG)
  • Teaching Assistant for Marc Ratkovic
• Formal Political Analysis I (G)
  • Teaching Assistant for Gleason Judd
• Formal Political Analysis II (G)
  • Teaching Assistant for Germán Gieczewski