ABOUT ME

Welcome to my website! I’m Nick, a PhD candidate in the political science department at the University of California, Merced. Previously, I earned my BA from the University of Texas at Dallas in International Political Economy, and a Master’s in Global Policy Studies at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.

My interests largely lay with local and indigenous political institutions. Check out my job market paper, Power to Prosper: Economic Development and Self-Governance, here. I use remote sensing measures of economic development to estimate the effect of increasing self-governance on American Indian reservations. Surprisingly, I find that self-governance reduced economic development in the short term with tentative evidence for the influence of tribal governance capacity.

You can also find my work published in the Journal of Politicial Institutions and Political Economy and the Annual Review of Political Science. Outside of my own work, I am a research affiliate with the PEARS Lab @ UC Merced and have experience working with Social Impact.