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Research
Firms, strategy and their environments
My research asks how firms navigate the political and social environments in which they operate —and how their own choices can, in turn, reshape those environments.
I approach these questions through strategy, international business and political economy, with particular interests in political and institutional risk, nonmarket strategy, geopolitics, and the ways social and political change becomes consequential for firms.
Selected research
My Kind of People: Political Polarization, Ideology and Firm Location
Strategic Management Journal · with Benjamin Barber IV · 2024
What happens when political polarization enters the workplace? We examine whether ideological differences shape where firms choose to locate new operations. Because trust and social ties facilitate collaboration and knowledge-sharing, we argue that firms have incentives to avoid creating ideological distance between their facilities. Analyzing more than 220,000 establishment openings in the United States, we find that firms are less likely to locate new operations in places that are politically different from their existing locations. Crucially, this tendency becomes stronger as society becomes more polarized, showing how broader social divisions can become consequential for seemingly economic strategic decisions.
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Policy Risk, Strategic Decisions and Contagion Effects: Firm‐specific Considerations
Strategic Management Journal · with Caterina Moschieri · 2017
How does direct experience with political risk change the way firms make strategic decisions? We examine formal disputes between multinational firms and governments and show that firms involved in a dispute become more likely to divest from the country concerned. But the effects do not stop there: those firms also become more likely to divest from other countries in the same region. The findings suggest that managers learn about political risk through their firms' own experiences, reassessing both their exposure to risk and their ability to manage it. Political events can therefore reshape strategic choices well beyond the particular country in which they occur.
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The Conditional Nature of Political Risk: How Home Institutions Influence the Location of Foreign Direct Investment
American Journal of Political Science · with Quintin H. Beazer · 2018
Why do some firms invest in institutional environments that others avoid? Conventional approaches to political risk tend to treat countries as more or less attractive to investors depending on the quality of their institutions. We argue instead that political risk is conditional: firms' experiences in their home countries shape the practices and capabilities they develop and, therefore, the environments they are prepared to navigate abroad. Examining foreign investment across multiple datasets, we find that firms and investment disproportionately flow between countries with similar levels of judicial independence. The implication is that there is no institutional environment that is equally attractive—or risky—to every firm.
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Recent and emerging work
Geopolitics and Global Strategy: Making Money under Anarchy
Global Strategy Journal· with Srividya Jandhyala & Quan Li · 2026
How do geopolitical relationships shape competitive advantage and strategy? We develop a framework linking geopolitical competition among states to the economic orders in which firms operate. Different geopolitical-economic orders create different opportunities, constraints and sources of competitive advantage, shaping both firms’ market and nonmarket strategies. As geopolitical relationships shift, the rules and relationships underpinning those advantages can shift with them. The framework therefore highlights the importance of understanding geopolitics not simply as a source of risk, but as a force that helps determine where competitive advantages come from and how durable they are.
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Mixing Motives: Political Donations by Corporate Executives
Organization Science· with Benjamin Barber IV · Forthcoming
Why do corporate executives give money to politicians? Political donations can reflect executives’ personal beliefs, but executives also lead organizations with significant interests in government policy. Using more than four decades of political donation data, we examine how these personal and strategic motivations intersect. We find evidence of both: executives appear more likely than other donors to behave strategically, but their personal political preferences continue to matter. The study highlights an important dimension of corporate political activity—the same political action can simultaneously reflect the preferences of an individual and the strategic interests of an organization.
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Geopolitics, Public Sentiment, and the Nonmarket Environment for Multinational Firms
Working paper· with Srividya Jandhyala, Quintin H. Beazer & Raphael Cunha
Why do citizens welcome some foreign companies and oppose others? Using a preregistered survey experiment with 4,750 respondents in India, we examine how a multinational’s country of origin and political messaging shape public attitudes toward foreign investment. We find substantial opposition to investment from a geopolitical rival, while supportive messages from political elites do little to overcome that distrust. The findings suggest that public sentiment is not simply background noise: it can become an important part of the political and strategic environment multinational firms must navigate.
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