This thesis presents five independent essays that advance causal inference in political science. It is divided into a methodological and an empirical part. The methodological part presents a suite of ...

During the neo-liberal reform wave of the 1990s, scores of developing countries privatized infrastructure services such as highways, utilities and ports. This dissertation provides a new theoretical ...

I formalize and test the ratchet effect, a theory that variation in the offense-defense balance and the cost of war leads to increasing geographic size of units (e.g., states, empires, and superpowers) in ...