Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, where I study how geography structures political and economic life in modern democracies. My research focuses on how cross-boundary movement—of people, goods, and infrastructure—reshapes local governance, redistribution, and representation.

My dissertation, Spatial Spillover and Silent Stakeholders: The Local Political Economy of Commuting, examines a central puzzle of modern local democracy: why do some communities resist economic development, even when it promises jobs, investment, and tax revenue? I argue that the rise of cross-boundary commuting—where people live in one municipality but work in another—has fundamentally transformed local politics. As nearly half of German workers and over half of U.S. workers now cross municipal lines to work, this mobility creates a structural mismatch between those who benefit from economic growth and those who vote on it. Using administrative data, survey experiments, and interviews across Germany, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and the United States, I show that municipalities with higher rates of commuting systematically invest less in productive infrastructure and more in residential amenities—and even curtail road networks near municipal borders to limit spillovers to neighboring jurisdictions.

More broadly, my work explores how spatial inequalities persist and how people experience political and economic loss through the places they inhabit. I combine geospatial analysis, archival research, and experimental methods to study the politics of mobility, infrastructure, and local autonomy in comparative perspective.

I hold degrees from Princeton University and the London School of Economics and Political Science, and my research has been supported by the American Political Science Association’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, Princeton’s Data-Driven Social Science Initiative, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.