Economic sanctions, repression capacity, and human rights (with Sinjae Kang and Taehee Whang) Journal of Human Rights 22, no. 2 (2023): 174-197.  [link]

When Does Audience Matter? Challengers’ Stability and Audience Costs (with Chamseul Yu and Taehee Whang) Foreign Policy Analysis 18, no. 3 (2022): orac011.  [link]

Can Middle Powers Coerce?: Behavioral Patterns in Intervention and Sanctions after Cold War (with Taehee Whang) Korean Political Science Review 56, no. 3 (2022): 69-95. [link]

Endogenous Fragility: Noncompliance and Enforcement in International Organizations [manuscript]

Revise and Resubmit, World Politics

Why do international organizations (IOs) deliberately choose ambitious goals that make cooperation fragile and enforcement noncredible? I show that this empirical puzzle can be answered without assuming asymmetric information. I develop a formal model of a dynamic interaction between an IO and a prospective member. The IO faces a trade-off between increasing the value of cooperation by setting ambitious goals and ensuring member compliance by scaling back. Importantly, while higher demands have a natural direct effect on the member's incentive to comply, they may also have a strategic indirect effect that undermines the IO's enforcement credibility. I find that the IO may optimally choose less reliable cooperation with overly ambitious goals followed by risk of noncompliance and crisis management over more stable cooperation with less ambitious goals.

Benefits of Ambiguity: Credibility and Uncertainty Problems in International Organization Enforcement [manuscript]

Under Review

International organizations often know a great deal about the members they enforce agreements against. I show that this knowledge can undermine enforcement. I develop a model in which an IO sets a contract and decides whether to punish non-compliance, with and without knowledge of the member's willingness to comply. Knowing this lets the IO tailor its demand but tempts it to forgive a lapse; not knowing makes the threat credible but the demand generic. The IO prefers not to know when its reward is small and its horizon long, since the loss of credibility outweighs the gain from tailoring. Using IMF conditionality data, I find that arrangements with smaller loans and longer durations carry more generic conditions and fewer waivers.

Joining to Survive: A Dynamic Empirical Model of WTO Membership [manuscript]

GATT/WTO membership has expanded dramatically over the past 70 years, yet the relative importance of the incentives driving this growth remains unclear. This ambiguity is further compounded by the dynamic process through which applicants and the organization jointly shape accession outcomes over time. I develop and estimate a model of organizational enlargement that jointly evaluates these incentives within a unified framework. In the model, the regimes decide when to apply, and the WTO times accession decisions to screen applicants. I find that regime survival is a primary objective for countries deciding whether to apply for WTO membership. WTO, on the other hand, values democracy; it favors democratic regimes and undermines the survival of non-democratic ones through its accession strategy. Non-democracies anticipate this and are less likely to apply than democracies. I also consider a counterfactual scenario and examine how WTO behavior changes when preference for democracy is removed.

Multinational Lobbyists: A Structural Approach to Lobbying and Foreign Direct Investment (with Randall Stone) [manuscript]

Investments by US firms project US power abroad and influence domestic politics in the receiving countries. For their part, firms build dynamic expectations about politics into their investment strategies and pursue political strategies to maximize the value of their investments. To capture these effects, we estimate a dynamic structural model of firm-level lobbying and foreign direct investment decisions. We find that both investment and lobbying become more profitable as the host country's political affinity with the United States increases, and that lobbying the US government becomes more profitable as the firm's investment exposure to a foreign country increases.

Strategic Ignorance: Explaining Variation in Monitoring Levels in International Organizations (with Muhammet Bas and Sujeong Shim)

Existing theories of international institutional design commonly portray a trade-off between stronger monitoring and membership size: stronger oversight increases the costs of membership and therefore reduces states’ willingness to participate. We argue that this view is incomplete because it overlooks a key benefit of monitoring: by facilitating the detection of noncompliance, strong monitoring makes member states’ commitments more credible. When such benefits are taken into account, we argue that the effect of monitoring on membership size is conditional. We expect that monitoring expands membership when international organizations (IOs) excuse violations caused by circumstances beyond a member state’s control. Such flexibility limits the expected costs of monitoring while preserving monitoring’s credibility-enhancing benefits. In contrast, monitoring shrinks membership size when IOs punish noncompliance regardless of circumstances. We derive these expectations using a formal model and test them with a novel dataset on the monitoring capabilities of 483 IOs established between 1815 and 2014. Consistent with our expectations, we find that stronger monitoring is associated with larger membership when IOs accommodate involuntary noncompliance through escape clauses but with smaller memberships when IOs provide no such flexibility. These findings generate important qualifications for the conventional accounts of breadth-depth trade-off. 

Nuclear Taboo or Nuclear Absolutism? Historical Learning and Nuclear Attitudes (with James D. Kim, Taehee Whang, and Chamseul Yu)

The nuclear norms literature holds that a taboo against the use and spread of nuclear weapons is widely internalized. We argue that this view overlooks a contrasting orientation we call nuclear absolutism: the belief that nuclear weapons are inherently beneficial to their possessor. Support for acquisition depends on both valuation and perceived necessity, and we argue that valuation is shaped by historical learning about what nuclear weapons have done for one's own country and for its adversaries. We test the argument with a survey experiment in South Korea, a case that combines indirect benefit from nuclear use in 1945 with prolonged exposure to a nuclearizing adversary. Each treatment holds a historical event constant and varies only the attributed cause, so the estimates compare nuclear attributions with non-nuclear accounts of the same events rather than with an inert control. Narratives crediting nuclear weapons with Korea's liberation and with North Korea's regime durability both increase support for indigenous armament, though the liberation effect is weaker and does not carry over to support for use. These effects are comparable to a treatment emphasizing the North Korean nuclear threat, while alliance uncertainty produces no significant change.

Rhetorical Pivoting in Talk Radio (with Jenn S. Kim and Chamseul Yu)

This paper studies how presidential campaign rhetoric shifted following the transition from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. Using real-time content analytics of radio livestreams from WavePulse and LLM-based text analysis, we examine how media outlets adjusted their messaging in response to the new candidate, identifying shifts in political discourse related to age and gender. Our findings offer insights into how campaign communication strategies evolve across partisanship in response to candidate change and highlight the central role of candidate identity in shaping campaign rhetoric.