2021 King Center Postdoctoral Fellows Conference

Wednesday, September 15, 2021

• 12:00pm - 12:45pm PDT

  Welcome and Introductions, Lunch

• 12:45pm - 1:30pm PDT

  The Limits of Legibility: How Distributive Conflicts Constrain State-Building

  Jeremy Bowles is a postdoctoral fellow at the King Center. He studies the political economy of development, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa and a substantive focus on questions of state capacity and electoral accountability. He received a PhD in political science from Harvard University in 2021 and, in September 2023, will join the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy at University College London as an assistant professor.
• 1:30pm - 2:15pm PDT

  Colonial Origins and Fertility: Can the Market Overcome History

  Marie Christelle Mabeu received her PhD in economics from the University of Ottawa. Her research interests span the fields of development economics, health economics, demographic economics, and political economy. Her doctoral thesis investigates the effects of historical and present-day institutions on important outcomes such as maternal and child health, early-age human capital accumulation, female empowerment, and reproductive behavior.
• 2:15pm - 2:30pm PDT

  15-min Coffee Break

• 2:30pm - 3:15pm PDT

  Pathways for Progress Toward Universal Access to Safe Drinking Water

  Yoshika Crider is an interdisciplinary global health researcher with training in engineering, epidemiology and biostatistics, and social science methods. She has a BS and MS in environmental engineering from Stanford University and a MS in epidemiology and PhD in energy & resources from UC Berkeley. She combines methods from environmental engineering and public health to study safe water and sanitation, with a geographic focus on South Asia. She is interested in pragmatic strategies for improving maternal and child well-being, with a particular interest in the implications of various interventions for gender equity. Her PhD research focused on evaluating novel passive chlorination technologies for system-level water treatment in small, piped water networks in rural Nepal. Her prior work included developing and adapting low-cost chlorination technologies for in-line water treatment in urban Bangladesh. As a King Center Postdoctoral Fellow, she plans to continue her ongoing safe water research and conduct new collaborative research on household infrastructure quality and health.
• 3:15pm - 4:00pm PDT

  Gender, Violence, and Triage: An Empirical and Text-as-Data Study of Crime in India

  Nirvikar Jassal’s research focuses on gender, sexual violence, ethnic conflict and hate crime, and policing with a regional focus on South Asia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review and Asian Survey.

  He completed his PhD from the University of California—Berkeley in 2020, and previously worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and New York City government.
• 4:00pm - 4:15pm PDT

  15-min Break

• 4:15pm - 5:00pm PDT

  The State Capacity Ceiling on Tax Rates: Evidence from Randomized Tax Abatements in the DRC

  Augustin Bergeron is a postdoctoral fellow at the King Center on Global Development. His research interests are in development economics, political economy, and public economics. His primary research agenda explores the determinants of state capacity, with a focus on taxation. His second agenda focuses on the origins of social groups (especially kinship) and their effects on development. His field work is based in the D.R. Congo, where he runs a research organization called Odeka. In September 2022, he will join USC's Department of Economics as an Assistant Professor.
• 5:00pm - 5:30pm PDT

  Happy Hour