I am a PhD candidate in political science at Vanderbilt University. I am a scholar of comparative politics, working at the intersection of political economy of development, local politics, and political behavior, with a regional focus on Latin America. My research examines the political economy of local state capacity and institutional strength, drawing on design-based causal inference, in-depth qualitative fieldwork, and original surveys.

In my book-style dissertation, I investigate how the spatial distribution of inequality in cities shapes citizens’ fiscal compliance and local state capacity. Over fourteen months of fieldwork in Brazil, I conducted interviews, focus groups, and a face-to-face survey to examine the local foundations of state capacity in unequal societies. In other projects, I study how social policies designed by national governments shape local state capacity and institutions. This agenda seeks to understand how housing and labor formalization policies affect the ways low-income individuals engage with formal institutions at the local level.

My work appears in Comparative Political Studies, Political Behavior, Political Science Research and Methods, among other journals. My research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the American Political Science Association, the Society for Political Methodology, the Center for Global Democracy (CGD), the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI), the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLACX) at Vanderbilt, the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), and Foundation for the Support of Science and Technology of the State of Pernambuco (FACEPE, Brazil).