I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at New York University, studying how elite structure shapes political power and long-run development. My research examines how the composition of elites, their network ties, and their responses to economic change produce divergent political outcomes — from public goods provision to political incorporation.
My job market paper investigates why economic expansion can reshape wealth hierarchies without reshaping political authority. I focus on Peru's export boom (1895–1919), a period of rapid wealth accumulation that transformed economic hierarchies without democratizing access to executive office. I argue that access to high office was regulated through elite marriage networks, and that relational position within those networks — not economic prominence alone — shaped which families gained access to the apex of political authority. I examine this argument using a novel family-year panel linking genealogical records, marriage networks, tax registries, and officeholding data.
Other projects examine how the composition of the economic elite shaped public goods provision in early twentieth-century Ecuador, and how trade shocks empowered economically prominent but politically excluded elites and may have shaped their support for redistributive political movements in Mexico. A second line of research investigates how institutional context shapes whether states can build capacity or translate reform into development.
I received an NSF/APSA Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (2024).
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