Theo Serlin

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. I study international and comparative political economy. My research integrates economic geography into political economy models of policy preferences and electoral politics. Accounting for variation in the efficiency of government provision between rural and urban areas, and for migration as a mechanism of economic adjustment, generates new and often counter-intuitive predictions about political alignments and reactions to economic change. I test these theories using newly-digitized historical data.

I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 2018 with an A.B. in History. I received an M.A. in Economics from Stanford in 2022.

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Publications
Trains, Trade and Transformation: A Spatial Rogowski Theory of America's 19th Century Protectionism (with Kenneth Scheve), accepted at American Journal of Political Science.
The German Trade Shock and the Rise of the Neo-Welfare State in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (with Kenneth Scheve), 2023, American Political Science Review 117 (2): 557-574.
Job Market Paper
The Public Agglomeration Effect: Urban-Rural Divisions in Government Efficiency and Political Preferences, 2023.
Working Papers
The Export Boom and the Backlash: Reactions to Positive Economic Change in First World War America, 2022. David A. Lake Award for best paper presented at the 2022 meeting of the International Political Economy Society.
Industry and Identity: The Migration Linkage Between Economic and Cultural Change in 19th Century Britain (with Vasiliki Fouka), 2023.

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