Are directors who govern natural resources biased towards their home districts? The literature predicts that they will be but we argue that mixed-territorial seat allocation can attenuate directors’ incentives for home bias. When a regional director represents one community among several directors competing for a fixed budget, advocating for one’s own community is constrained and thus directors are dissuaded from rent-seeking behaviours. We test our theory using the Columbia Basin Trust, a natural resource fund that distributes compensation for hydropower development across southeastern British Columbia. Using synthetic control methods to estimate the Trust’s effect on regional development, and a 2000 to 2025 panel of grants matched to board membership, we find positive developmental returns and no evidence of home-district bias. Communities with place-based representation fare no better than those without, and this holds whether that director holds an official regional appointment or a provincial appointment without an assigned territory. Our findings demonstrate that board-level institutional design is consequential for the success of development and redistribution.
Publication Alert
My recent research note with Carola Binder on the difficulties of using standard, off the shelf Large Language Models (LLM) and labeled data to study emotion in central bank communications is now out at the National Institute Economic Review. Our key insight is that central bank communication is both lexically and subjectively difficult for people to understand.
Publication Alert
My paper with Dominik Duell and Will Lowe on ECB communication and support for the EU is forthcoming at the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy. This journal is becoming one of my favourite journals to read so I am so excited that this paper finally landed here. We show that while people are persuaded by central bank news and update their beliefs accordingly, how much they do so depends on their support for the European project and the ECB.
Automated Detection of Emotion in Central Bank Communication: A Warning
Senior Visiting Fellow: LSE Data Science Institute
Happy to announce that I am now a senior visiting fellow at the LSE’s Data Science Institute. Whilst here, I will be working on a project related to bank branch closures in the UK and their effects on Political and Economic perceptions and behaviours.