Biography

I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington, Seattle in summer 2007. I have MA degrees from University of Washington and from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

My areas of interest are European integration, comparative federalism, international institutions, globalization and the welfare state.

My dissertation, entitled From Competition to Cooperation: Subsidies in the United States, Canada and the European Union, explores the conditions under which governments can regulate competition to attract investment in a world of increasingly mobile capital.

Focusing specifically on competition in subsidies to business, I explore how multi-level political systems, which increasingly feel the effects of such competition among their member jurisdictions, respond to this competition. My empirical research compares two federal states, the United States and Canada, with an economic union, the EU.

In the dissertation, I argue that the degree of capital mobility, the electoral institutions and party politics in the constituent units, and the central decision making procedures of the multi-level polity influence the likelihood of intergovernmental cooperation to regulate subsidy competition. My dissertation uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to empirically examine these arguments and relies on my fieldwork in Brussels and Ottawa. I presented parts of this research at international conferences and published an article on the politics of industrial subsidies in the OECD countries in the Journal of European Public Policy.

I have taught courses on international relations and on Europe’s role in world politics. At EUI, I will continue my research on subsidy regulation in multi-level systems and extend this research to the international level.