Daniel T. Roberts

Hello, I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. I am a political economist who conducts research on the politics of opportunity focusing on credit access, education, and labor market policy in rich democracies, including the American Political Economy. I am on the academic job market and my CV can be found [here].

My dissertation explains why policies that reinforce unequal opportunity are so politically resilient in the United States, Germany, and Japan. I argue that middle-class families defend “opportunity boundaries” when they lack alternative strategies to secure their socio-economic status and test this argument with mixed-methods analyses of voting behavior, public opinion, and archival sources in my cases. I have a working paper that draws from the German case of this project, which examines an episode where voters blocked an attempt to delay students from being sorted at an early age across stratified schools in the city-state of Hamburg. I test my argument that this policy persisted because status-uncertain German families defend it through mass mobilization using evidence from administrative data on city-districts, precinct-level vote returns, election studies, and media archives.

I also study how the drawing of boundaries around opportunity can promote financial crises. This extends on work I published in the Journal of Banking and Finance, which shows regulation enacted after the 2008 financial crisis reduced the risk of a crisis recurring but also constrained lending to non-financial firms. I have a working paper that builds theory on the political implications of this trade-off and examines the 2018 rollback of the Dodd-Frank Act to show that local dependence on banks explains why Congressional representatives voted to loosen financial regulation, causing three of the largest bank failures in American history in 2023. This previews future research directions that will explore how domestic strategies to secure access to opportunity given exclusionary boundaries can promote financial risk-taking that triggers global credit crises.

I have teaching experience in all subfields of political science at the undergraduate and graduate level. I specialize in teaching political economy courses that employ multiple methodological approaches, including formal models, applied statistics, qualitative methods, and normative theory. Applying this breadth, I developed a syllabus on "Opportunity Politics" and taught a course on it 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!