Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor at Seton Hall University with a joint appointment in the Department of Political Science and the Department of Economics. I am also a faculty affiliate of the Princeton Sovereign Finance Lab. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technical University of Munich. I earned my PhD from UCLA. My research interests are in International and Comparative Political Economy, and I have two articles forthcoming in International Organization. My methodological interests include causal inference, machine learning, Bayesian methods, natural language processing, and time-series analysis.

Substantively, my research examines how commercial actors—such as investors, financial intermediaries, and firms—operate within and shape political and legal institutions, and how these interactions generate unintended economic and political consequences. I am particularly interested in how private market actors leverage courts, contracts, and regulatory frameworks to advance commercial claims, and how states respond to these pressures through borrowing, default, and institutional design.

Currently, I am completing my book, Domesticating the International: The Uneven Enforcement of Investors’ Preferences and Its Unintended Consequences. It explains how the United States’ shift from absolute to restrictive sovereign immunity allowed federal courts—especially the Southern District of New York—to become the de facto regulators of international sovereign debt markets. The book traces this unintended, court-centered enforcement regime—from the Tate Letter and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act through its operation in the courtroom to its recent erosion. Read more about the book →

Beyond my work on sovereign debt, I also study financial issues in the Middle East, including the political economy of Islamic finance. In a separate line of research, I develop work on green finance that examines how, why, and when governments, non-governmental organizations, and global institutions finance climate change mitigation efforts.

You may contact me at: monica.widmann@shu.edu