Research

My research program asks a single question across very different historical and institutional settings: when does regulation actually serve the public interest, and when is it better understood as protection for incumbents, a tool of bureaucratic expansion, or a substitute for order that markets and communities already provide? I combine historical institutional analysis with modern econometric and panel-data methods, in the tradition of Buchanan, Tullock, and Stigler and the Austrian emphasis on knowledge problems and spontaneous order.

Dissertation

My dissertation develops this question through three essays.

1. The strategic origins of food-and-drug regulation

My job market paper shows how Dr. Harvey Wiley and the USDA Bureau of Chemistry framed the Bottled-in-Bond Act of 1897 as consumer protection while engineering bonding and labeling requirements that favored the incumbent aged distillers who lobbied for it — and that expanded the Bureau’s own jurisdiction. Drawing on a newly hand-collected district-level panel of bonded-whiskey withdrawals, newspaper price data, and the legislative record, it documents a Bootleggers-and-Baptists coalition operating before the modern administrative state. Read more →

2. Private order in banking panics

Assembling a new dataset of 544 bank runs hand-coded from digitized newspapers (1889–1929), this chapter (with Daniel J. Smith) documents how localized runs were contained by a rich toolkit of private, market-based mechanisms — qualifying the standard case for deposit insurance and a fully developed lender of last resort. Read more →

3. Protectionism at the ballot box

Switzerland’s 1908 vote to ban absinthe is usually read as a public-health triumph. Using a newly assembled canton-level dataset (with Nicholas A. Jensen), this chapter shows that wine-producing cantons — absinthe’s commercial rivals — disproportionately supported the ban once language and confession are held constant, evidence that public-health rhetoric can mask economic self-interest when protectionism is enacted directly by voters. Read more →

Beyond the dissertation

With coauthors, I also study how early American whiskey entrepreneurs privately assured consumers of quality before federal regulation — a market-for-lemons setting that did not unravel (Assuring Consumers of Authenticity, Safety, and Quality). As a 2026 Graduate Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, I am beginning new work on economic freedom and state coercion, and ongoing projects examine the asset-pricing consequences of Prohibition’s repeal and the link between welfare generosity and alcohol consumption.

For full summaries, figures, and interactive data from each paper, see Explore My Research.