Princeton University

Adam is a graduate student in Princeton’s psychology department. He completed his undergraduate degree in psychology and law at the University of New South Wales, and has been at Princeton since 2004. He has several research interests that coalesce around the general issue of human judgment and decision making. His research considers, among other questions, why group stereotypes are so persistent, how to alleviate the threat of failure experienced by students who identify with groups that are typically associated with academic inferiority, and how judges and jurors arrive at legal decisions in criminal law cases. www.princeton.edu/~aalter/

Angie’s research interests lie in the field of corporate finance. She is working on problems of delegated portfolio management and in particular on the optimality of the compensation contracts offered to hedge fund managers. This work’s implications range from portfolio allocation decisions to hedge fund regulation. Another line of her research deals with corporate governance and the different motivations that guide directors’ behavior when choosing the optimal level of monitoring. She has developed a model that has various implications for the functioning of corporations and governments, and could be useful in guiding legislators' and activist investors' resolutions in their quest for improved governance.

Silvia Barcellos is a doctoral candidate in economics. Before coming to Princeton, she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in economics at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her main fields of study are labor economics and development economics. She has researched the labor market consequences of immigration to the United States, the effects of legalization programs on the economic status of immigrants, and issues on time use and gender discrimination in India.  

Debbie is completing a dissertation on the City of Philadelphia's use of eminent domain. Her dissertation will offer the first comprehensive scholarly study of how ideas to use eminent domain develop; what processes a government uses to pursue these ideas; and what kinds of negotiations, conflicts and justifications result. The project will develop theory on how the practice of property and the law support cooperation and enforce separation of government and business.
lapa.princeton.edu/peopledetail.php?ID=361

Nick received his BA in American studies and history from Northwestern University in 2000. While working as a Teach For America corps member in Washington D.C., he founded "I Have A Dream" – Project 312 (www.project312.org), a long-term youth development organization that empowers 30 of his elementary school students to achieve while providing a guaranteed opportunity for higher education. At Princeton, Nick works from within sociology, Office of Population Research, and the Woodrow Wilson School on issues surrounding educational inequality in the United States. For his dissertation, he has returned to Washington D.C. to explore the multiple paths his former students have taken, some confidently in pursuit of a high school diploma, others on the fence, and still others headed in dangerous directions.

Andrea is a Ph.D. candidate in the politics department. Her primary research interest is in democratic foreign policy decision-making, especially the politics surrounding the use of military force by democracies and the role of public opinion and public pressure in influencing these decisions. Her dissertation asks why Western democracies respond to politically induced humanitarian emergencies abroad as they do. In particular, when do they resort to the use of military force in these situations, and how are their decisions influenced by the views of different groups of citizens?

Marco Gonzalez-Navarro is a development economist interested in crime, urban economics, housing economics and social capital. After Princeton, he will be a member of the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research at the University of California-Berkeley.

Shana's research interests include American politics, political behavior, public opinion, political communication and political psychology.

Dena's research focuses on how people respond to wrongdoing, particularly criminal violations. In her dissertation research, Dena has investigated how both the situational factors that are present in judgment context, and the stable characteristics that people bring to these contexts, influence their preferences for both retributive justice (punishing the wrong that has been committed) and restorative justice (repairing the harm that has been caused by crime).

Romy is an architectural historian and scholar whose research shows how the study of the American landscape is linked to a prevalent conception of man’s role as steward of the land and that this form of appreciation is a central feature of landscape discourse in postwar America.

Lydia's dissertation focuses on recycling material experiments and the emergence of ecological theories in architecture, through the intersection of cybernetics and the space program. The tile of her dissertation is “Mission Galactic Household.”

Gregoire's dissertation "Sovereignty by Design: US Nuclear Foreign Policy, Transnational Experts and the Creation of Supranational Communities," explores how the globalization of modern science and technology has changed the way science is produced and evaluated, and how, by doing so, it has redefined the power and legitimacy of modern nation-states. www.princeton.edu/~gmallard/

Molly is currently interested in the causes and effects labor migration. Specifically, her research focuses on the determinants of intentions to emigrate as well as the impacts of labor migration on local labor markets. She is also interested in the relationship between income inequality and the disparity in educational attainment across the U.S. www.princeton.edu/~mfifer

Mette is a development economist whose work focuses on conditional cash transfer programs for health and education in Latin America. She has studied the effect of these programs on credit and private transfers, and has also conducted a survey in Colombia to examine why transfers to the poor should (or should not) be conditional on investment in health and education. 
 

Andrew's research interests include public opinion, elections, political psychology, and the link between public opinion and policy. In addition to work on broader questions within these fields, he also studies the causes and consequences of citizen behavior within the Canadian context. His dissertation considers asymmetries in the relationship between policy changes and support for incumbent politicians. He finds citizens' responses to negative changes are substantially stronger than their responses to positive changes.

Christine's research focuses on answering the question “How are new behaviors associated with the second demographic transition — including delayed marriage, greater marital instability, lower fertility, and increased women’s employment — affecting gender and class inequalities?” Christine is also working on income inequality (with Bruce Western and Deirdre Bloome) and on the rise in non-marital births and decline in shotgun weddings (with Chris Wildeman).

Rainer uses game-theoretic models to help us understand how political institutions map into policy outcomes and how they affect the quality of government. His most recent work argues that, in U.S. presidential primaries, fundraising plays a key role in determining the quality of information available to voters. Thus, electoral calendars which most benefit voters and which are most likely to enable them to make good choices will be designed to maximize the amount of donations. In earlier work, he has highlighted the effect of electoral incentives on the ability of political parties to recruit high-quality candidates, and the limits of voting as a tool for disciplining politicians.

Felipe's work centers on understanding how financial shocks feed into the real economy, with special attention to cross-sectional differences in industry and firm-level performance. From an applied theory perspective, he is particularly interested in the role of credit constraints in propagating and amplifying these shocks.

Danielle's interests include public opinion, civic engagement, political socialization, political psychology and democratic theory. She has an ongoing project about partisan biases in political perceptions of “objective” national conditions. In her dissertation, she explores the ways in which citizens develop an interest in politics, by testing various theories about the origins of political interest, such as family socialization, high-school socialization, and the force of events experienced during one’s formative years.

Vinayak's research is in the area of game theory and mechanism design. He is interested in problems associated with the design of institutions and contracts. In particular, his research focuses on constructing regulated environments that permit strategic agents to interact productively. His work has implications in a number of arenas, including the efficient structure of elections, the optimality of taxation schemes and the design of markets.