Local News, Partisanship, and Perceptions about Election Administration
Electoral Studies, 97, 102970 (2025). Journal article ↗
Kexin Bai
Publications
Working Papers
Drafts are available upon request.
Firms and Supply Chains under Export Controls
Restriction Expectations and Firm Innovation under U.S. Export Controls
U.S. export controls restrict target access to dual-use technologies to protect national security and slow technological rivals. I argue that these restrictions can instead spur innovation by targeted firms. I develop a restriction expectations theory linking the sender government, the sender firm, and the targeted firm’s adaptation. Greater onset severity signals stronger U.S. resolve and leads targeted firms to expect tighter future restrictions, increasing their incentives to innovate. By contrast, U.S. suppliers whose sales to targeted firms are restricted may seek licenses or press for more flexible implementation. When these suppliers have greater political capacity, targeted firms have more reason to expect restrictions to bind less tightly, weakening the positive effect of onset severity on self-innovation. I test the argument using 405 U.S. Entity List notices and a new Bayesian, time-varying measure of firm-level sanctions severity. I compare 62 sanctioned Chinese corporate groups with 5,309 industry peers using stacked difference-in-differences. Targeted firms facing higher onset severity show larger post-listing increases in R&D spending, invention, and utility patenting than peers. Identification is cleanest for utility patents. A greater pre-sanction federal lobbying spending record by sender firms significantly weakens the estimated effect of onset severity on invention and utility model patenting, but not on R&D spending. This pattern suggests targeted firms maintain research investment while facing less urgency to translate that research into patentable outputs. This paper shifts the study of sanctions effectiveness beyond compliance toward politically shaped targeted firm adaptation. Severe restrictions can encourage targeted firms to pursue technological self-reliance, while expectations that restrictions will bind less tightly weaken that response.
Navigating Targeted Sanctions: A Real Options Theory of American Firm Responses and Financial Performance
Under review
Do targeted sanctions hurt American firms financially? Existing research offers competing arguments but little firm-level evidence on financial fundamentals. We shift the debate from aggregate sender costs to response-conditional performance. Our real options theory shows that partial, evolving sanctions present firms with binary choices depending on their starting position. Prior suppliers stay or exit; prior non-suppliers enter or stay out. Firms select among these options based on their resources and each option’s expected value, so response-group performance reflects selection into each path. We test the theory using U.S. Entity List restrictions on Huawei. We examine 545 supplier and peer firms during 2015–2023 with probit and doubly robust difference-in-differences models. Outside options predict exit; financial flexibility predicts entry. Entrants achieve a persistent ROA advantage of 4–5 percentage points. Exiters and stayers show no statistically significant peer-relative underperformance. Treating exposed firms as a single group, therefore, obscures response-conditional financial outcomes of targeted sanctions.
Strategic Targeting and Chinese Firms’ Supply Network under U.S. Export Control
How does the United States select Chinese firms for export-control restrictions, and how do targeted firms reorganize their supply chain networks? We argue that Entity List designation operates as preventive capability denial. Regulators prioritize firms whose sector, ownership, and research intensity indicate that continued technological access could augment strategically relevant Chinese capabilities. Designated firms then respond to uncertainty about the future scope and extraterritorial reach of restrictions by developing alternative sourcing options. We evaluate these arguments using a new event-based dataset of Entity List actions linked to firm ownership, financial, and supply-chain data. Strategic-sector status, state ownership, and pre-designation R&D intensity significantly predict designation. After designation, relative to their peers, targeted firms show no detectable decline in the number of U.S. suppliers, but they expand supplier relationships in U.S.-aligned economies, other foreign countries, and China. The findings indicate geographically differentiated portfolio expansion rather than simple one-for-one substitution or immediate bilateral decoupling. Our research demonstrates the importance of studying target selection and firm adaptation together when evaluating network-based economic statecraft.
The Geopolitical Dynamics of Export Control: A Temporal Graph Approach
Under review
Export controls have become one of America’s most prominent tools of economic statecraft. They aim to block rival countries’ access to sensitive technologies, safeguard U.S. supply chains, protect national security, and shape geopolitical competition. Among various instruments, the U.S. Entity List has emerged as the most salient, yet its dynamics remain underexplored. This paper transforms the Entity List documents from a static registry of foreign entities of concern into a temporal bipartite graph that encodes the geopolitical dynamics. Building on this representation, we develop a multi-level analytical approach that reveals shifting roles, enforcement strategy, and broader sanction ecosystems. Applied to 28 years of data, the framework uncovers dynamic patterns of escalation, persistence, and coordination that static views cannot capture. More broadly, our study demonstrates how temporal graph analysis offers systematic computational insights into the geopolitical dynamics of export control.
Geopolitical Alignment and International Order
Measuring Alignment in the Era of Great Power Politics: Case of Ten Southeast Asian Countries
Under review
How closely is a country aligned with the United States and China over time? Measuring and understanding alignment is central to international relations. We conceptualize alignment as the proximity of one country to the other in terms of political, economic, and security relations. Using exploratory factor analysis, this article introduces a quantitative approach to measure these shifting dynamics based on 13 variables covering political, economic, and security relations. To demonstrate the feasibility and utility of this approach, this paper generates alignment scores (A-scores) for 10 Southeast Asian countries from 2000 to 2023. The proposed A-score approach is flexible enough to incorporate additional dyads, variables, and time periods. More importantly, the A-scores have the potential to deepen our understanding of the causes and consequences of alignment in global politics.
Supported by the Carnegie-funded project “Small State Statecraft and Realignment” (PI: Hyeran Jo; grant G-PS-24-62004).
Alignment in Contemporary International Relations: Concept and Measurement
Under review
Clear cleavages existed during the Cold War with US-aligned, USSR-aligned, and non-aligned countries. How can we identify the post-Cold War international alignments? Taking the features of contemporary international politics, we define alignment as a country’s political, economic, and security proximity to a global superpower. Using a Bayesian approach and 12 political, economic, and security variables, we develop a multi-dimensional measure of interstate alignment. The measurement, which we call A-scores, produces dyadic alignment patterns for all countries vis-à-vis the United States and China between 2000 and 2020. Departing from the previous focus on alliances or voting at the United Nations as manifestations of alignment, the new concept and measure of interstate alignment can be useful for understanding contemporary international relations. We demonstrate the utility of A-scores by comparing them with existing measures and illustrating their validity. Future research can adopt and adapt the A-score to uncover the nature of contemporary alignment politics and to better understand the current and future world order.
Supported by the Carnegie-funded project “Small State Statecraft and Realignment” (PI: Hyeran Jo; grant G-PS-24-62004).
Gender and International Politics
Premium or Penalty? Female Leadership and FDI Attraction in the United States
Existing research on gender and foreign direct investment (FDI) has mainly focused on broad indicators of women’s status, such as education, health, and legislative representation, while paying much less attention to whether the gender of the chief executive matters for FDI attraction. This omission is notable given that chief executives play an important role in promoting foreign investment. We develop competing expectations about the effect of female leadership on FDI. On one hand, female chief executives may attract more FDI by signaling a cleaner investment environment. On the other hand, they may face a penalty if their greater emphasis on social welfare makes them less attractive to profit-seeking foreign investors. We test these expectations in the United States, the world’s largest recipient of FDI. Using project-level data on all announced greenfield FDI from 2003 to 2023 and a matched conditional-logit design, we find that states led by female governors are significantly less likely to be chosen as FDI destinations. This penalty is larger among Republican governors and under copartisan alignment between the governor and the secretary of state, and it varies across sectors and project size. These findings contribute to research on the determinants of FDI, women’s political representation, and the role of executive leadership in shaping subnational investment outcomes.
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