Welcome! For the 2023-2024 academic year, I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. I earned my PhD in Political Science from UCLA. My research interests are in International and Comparative Political Economy. Specifically, I study sovereign debt politics, economic reform, and distributive politics. My methodological interests include the application and development of Causal Inference, Machine Learning, Bayesian techniques, and Time Series.

Currently, I am working on a number of papers covering green finance. I am also working on my book project, an extension of my dissertation titled Domesticating the International: The Uneven Enforcement of Investors’ Preferences and its Unintended Consequences. It examines when US courts choose to extend the reach of US private property rights via the application of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and the economic consequences for the debtor state, if any.

You may contact me at: mwidmann@econ.ucla.edu