Daniel T. Roberts

Hello, I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. I will be on the academic job market in Fall 2025. My CV can be found [here].

I research on the politics of opportunity with a political economy approach, focusing on credit access, education, and labor market policy. I study these policy areas across rich democracies, including in the American Political Economy.

My first job market paper offers a theory of "Boundary Defense" to explain why policies that limit equal opportunity are resilient, and applies it to the case of early-age school tracking in Germany. I show that status-uncertain families block reform using polling-place votes, surveys, and qualitative evidence. My book project extends this theory to explaining unequal opportunity in the U.S. and Japan, while also examining how "Boundary Coalitions" of opportunity outsiders and vested interest groups form to pursue more gradual reform in the wake of successful boundary defense.

My second job market paper examines the politics of the 2018 Dodd-Frank rollback in the US. It theorizes that "local dependence" creates coalitions of interest between firms and localities that depend on them. I construct a data-set of local dependence on banks using branch-level data to provide evidence that this explains the rollback better than alternatives. This builds on insights from both my research published in the Journal of Banking and Finance and my book project, previewing future work examining how domestic opportunity politics can contribute to global financial instability.

My teaching history reflects my broad political economy approach, including experience teaching on Comparative Politics, American Education Politics, International Political Economy, Public Policy, and Political Theory. This breadth is highlighted in a syllabus on "Opportunity Politics"  that I developed and taught as a lead-instructor.

Before beginning my Ph.D., I received a B.A. in Economics at the University of Chicago and worked as a Research Analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. During my Ph.D., I received an M.A. in Government at Harvard, and have been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, the AxPo Observatory of Market Society Polarization at Sciences Po Paris, and Nuffield College at Oxford University while on a Fellowship from Harvard's Center for European Studies, where I am also an affiliate. 

Feel free to reach out at danielroberts (at) g.harvard.edu if you have any questions!