He is teaching a senior seminar on democratic erosion in spring 2018. His research interests fall under the broad category of political economy of development, with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. In his work, he uses a host of causal inference tools as well as text and social network analysis to address substantive questions regarding political behavior, economic development, and conflict processes. His work has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International organization, British Journal of Political Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Before coming to UPenn, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University and a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Development Strategies at Columbia University.