I am a Postdoctoral Associate at NYU Abu Dhabi. I hold a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. My main research interests are at the intersection of the political economy of development, distributive politics, and identity politics in the Middle East and in the comparative context. I use a combination of archival research, statistical methods, case studies, survey experiments, and formal theory in my work.

In my book project I explore how ethnic and religious diversity shape the patterns of state building and distributional outcomes. The primary empirical focus of my dissertation is the late 19th and early 20th century Ottoman Empire. The data for this project comes from my original archival work in the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul.

My other published and ongoing projects similarly cover the topics of the political economy of development, distributive politics, and identity politics. They include work that examine the sources of fiscal capacity in the colonial era and modern day Arab states, what makes the ruler’s commitments to property rights credible, why strong rule of law matters for fiscal capacity building, when central governments can eliminate tax farming, how regime insecurity shapes bureaucratic capacity, and how out-group tax evasion shapes tax morale . You can view them on my research page.