Research
My recent work focuses mainly on international finance, geopolitical fragmentation, and macro-financial transmission. I am especially interested in how global risk, bilateral frictions, and institutional constraints shape cross-border financial allocation.
Working Papers and Research Projects
Geopolitical Distance and the Sensitivity of Bilateral Capital Flows to Global Risk
This paper studies whether bilateral geopolitical distance affects not only the level of cross-border portfolio investment but also the extent to which those flows respond to changes in global risk. Extending Albuquerque (2003), I develop a mechanism in which geopolitically distant country pairs face tighter participation constraints and therefore exhibit lower portfolio investment and weaker sensitivity to VIX shocks. Empirically, I estimate a bilateral gravity model with source-time and destination-time fixed effects on a 2001 to 2018 panel of bilateral portfolio flows, using UNGA voting divergence as a geopolitical-distance measure and IV strategies motivated by the recent financial-fragmentation literature.
The results indicate that geopolitically distant dyads have both lower portfolio flows and substantially weaker sensitivity to global risk, with investment composition shifting toward FDI. The paper won the Norman and Ruth Sun Memorial Writing Prize.
The Popularity Effects of Soccer Leagues Remaining Active During COVID Lockdowns
This paper examines whether a temporary exposure shock can create lasting consumer demand. The setting is the Belarusian Premier League’s decision to remain active during the initial COVID lockdown while many higher-profile leagues suspended play. Using monthly Google Trends data and a dynamic difference-in-differences design, I compare the Belarusian league with similar control leagues to test whether the spike in exposure translated into durable popularity.
The main finding is that the Belarusian league experienced a very large and statistically significant attention shock, but the effect faded quickly once major leagues resumed. I was invited to present this project at Temple’s Undergraduate Research Symposium in March 2026.
Course Papers
No-Arbitrage Linear Pricing, the Riesz Representation Theorem, and the Stochastic Discount Factor
Full draft withheld until course submission is complete.
This paper studies asset pricing as a problem in abstract linear algebra on the payoff space $L^2(\Omega,\mathcal{F},P)$. I first show that no-arbitrage implies a linear pricing rule, then use the Riesz Representation Theorem to prove that every continuous linear price functional can be written uniquely as $\pi(X)=\mathbb{E}[mX]$ for some stochastic discount factor $m \in L^2$. The paper then solves a standard one-period consumption problem and proves that the resulting discounted marginal-utility kernel is exactly the same object as the abstract Riesz representation. The project is meant to bridge functional analysis and standard asset-pricing intuition in a clean, self-contained way.
Current Research Assistance
- Ongoing work with Professor Olga Timoshenko at Temple University applies text analysis to news coverage of the U.S.-South Korea trade agreement, combining embedding-based article filtering, automated sentiment scoring, and industry-level trade data to study the economic content of negotiation-period reporting.