Senior Thesis

My senior thesis is still in its preliminary stages—after all senior year hasn't even started yet. However, as an overview, I plan on studying attitudes toward nuclear weapons in India.

Among nuclear armed states, India has historically had some of the most widely entrenched norms regarding the non-use of nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Jawaharal Nehru was one of the foremost advocates against proliferation in the wake of World War II, and four years after the Kargil War, India formally adopted a no first use policy. However, the long-held norm against the use of nuclear weapons has weakened under Narendra Modi (and to a lesser degree, the Congress government that preceded him). In 2019, Indian airstrikes struck non-disputed Pakistani territory for the first time since 1971, risking nuclear escalation per then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Security studies scholars have also raised alarm that India is quietly hollowing out its NFU, pivoting to a counterforce strategy. India’s legacy as a responsible, nuclear armed state is in tension with the existing security concerns amplified by the BJP’s nationalist rhetoric. As a result, India makes for a compelling test case regarding whether long-standing norms against the use of nuclear weapons can endure during times of heightened nationalism and security anxiety.

Executive Constraints and Trade Policy

In an undergraduate seminar taken with Professor Nikhar Gaikwad, I wrote a paper on how executive constraints impact trade policy. In this paper, I argue theoretically that executive constraints should impact trade policy differently in democracies and authoritarian regimes. In democracies, I expected states would, on average, liberalize trade when moving from executive parity to unilateral executive control (akin to delegative democracy). In authoritarian regimes, I expected that executive constraints would have no effect on trade policy.

When I ran time series regression models to test these hypotheses, I found little substantiation for the former. In fact, I even found statistically significant evidence to suggest that tariffs fall with the better separation of powers in democracies. I don't have a good reason as to why we observe this aside from colinearity obscuring point estimates, but here's the paper nonetheless:

Trade Wars in the Lab

As the U.S. threatened severe tariffs in early 2025, a fellow student, Oliver Fuisz, and I decided to run a pilot experiment that we argue approximates a trade war between two states. The game is a series of prisoners' dilemmas with worsening pay-offs. In the last round of the game, there is a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, considering it's just a normal PD. However, because we can assume all players will play the equilibrium in the last round, it changes how all previous rounds should function. Specifically, they become games of chicken, instead of being PDs. Check out the paper for more: