LAUREN PERITZ

Welcome to my website. I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. For the 2016-17 academic year, I visited Princeton University as a Fellow in the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. 

My research is on international political economy using statistical methods for causal inference.  I aim to understand how international courts promote economic cooperation among countries and when domestic politics mediates their effect. This research is featured in my new book. Other recent work uses machine learning with text-as-data to ​investigate whether and why U.S. trade and immigration policy have shifted in a “backlash” against economic globalization. The National Science Foundation and the Hellman Fellows Program have supplied generous funding to support my work. 

I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science and a M.S. in Statistics, both from University of California, Los Angeles. I also have a B.S. in engineering physics from Cornell University. Prior to my academic career, I worked as a patent agent for WilmerHale in the Boston office, focusing on patent prosecution for semiconductor and nano technology.