About Me

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Chair of East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University.  My research focuses on issues related to the regulatory state, the political economy of finance, and policy innovation in E. Asia and China.  

I am the author of On Feeding the Masses: An Anatomy of Regulatory Failure in China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) which examines the regulatory politics involved in China's unrelenting food safety crisis.  The book argues that in order to understand China's governance failures, scholars, regulators, and consumers must take a deeper look at the challenges large-scale countries face (in terms of scale externalities, multilevel coordination challenges, and problem identification).  I have also written on regulatory politics and development issues in aviation safety, environmental protection, fishery conservation, and financial regulation.  

My current book project, How East Asia Re-Engineered the Stock Market considers why regulators in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan employ hard paternalist tools - such as IPO bans, price limits, and short selling suspensions - even as they liberalize capital markets and court foreign investors.  Drawing on over 120 elite interviews with finance officials, exchange officers, and institutional investors, I argue that E. Asia’s financial regulators are guided by a distinct set of “necessary fictions.”  These are untested, unfalsifiable assumptions that serve as first principles for regulatory decision making.  In contrast to the Anglosphere’s belief in rational investors, efficient markets, and laissez faire, East Asia’s regulators are driven by the specter of an irrational investor, inefficient market, and an activist state.  These necessary fictions serve as axioms, deductively compelling regulators towards hard paternalism and are incredibly difficult to change.  In highlighting, the factory settings of the E. Asian regulator, the book draws our attention to the fictional foundations that undergird modern finance across the globe. 

I am published in the China Policy Journal, the China Quarterly, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Regulation and Governance, Politics & Society and the Journal of Politics.  My work has also been cited by a number of media outlets, including Bloomberg, Guardian, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Southern Weekly (南方周末), and Washington Post.  

I received my PhD in comparative politics from the University of California, Berkeley.  I was then a postdoctoral fellow at Penn's Center for the Study of Contemporary China.   I hold an MPhil in comparative politics from the University of Oxford and a BA from Harvard College.