"Classroom Walls and City Hall: Mobilizing Local Partnerships to Advance the Sustainable Development Agenda"

with Erin Bromaghim, Angela Kim, Caroline Diamond, Alejo Maggini, Avery Everhart, Sofia Gruskin, and Anthony Tirado Chase. This roundtable discussion raises and responds to the question: What can be learned from academic and local government partnerships to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? We draw on several years of cooperation between the Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles (CA, USA) and academic institutions on how to best advance and integrate the United Nations’ SDGs into policy. Stakeholders from this project give voice to varying perspectives across roles—as city officials, academic partners, graduate and undergraduate students—in the Los Angeles case of SDG implementation. The article outlines a “Task Force” model, under the joint facilitation of faculty advisors and guidance of city partners, that promotes students’ experiential learning, and meaningfully bridges theory and practice in bringing global frameworks to local practice. We highlight what we gain by disaggregating the local and taking space and place seriously in sustainability policy, while underscoring the importance of long-term trust and relationship building in the success of local sustainability efforts.

"Measuring Arms: Introducing the Global Military Spending Dataset" (forthcoming in the Journal of Conflict Resolution)

with Miriam Barnum, Christopher Fariss, and Jonathan Markowitz. Military spending data measure key international relations concepts such as balancing, arms races, the distribution of power, and the severity of military burdens. Unfortunately, missing values and measurement error threaten the validity of existing findings. Addressing this challenge, we introduce the Global Military Spending Dataset (GMSD). GMSD collates new and existing expenditure variables from a comprehensive collection of sources, expands data coverage, and employs a latent variable model to estimate missing values and quantify measurement error. We validate the data and present new findings. First, correlations between economic surplus and military spending are currently higher than at any point in the last two-hundred years. Second, updating DiGiuseppe and Poast’s (2018) analysis, we find larger substantive effects. Specifically, we find that the (negative) effect of a democratic ally on military spending is three times larger, and the (positive) effect of an increase in GDP is five times larger than previously estimated.