Assist. Prof. Nicholas Li

Partisan Gerrymandering

One area of Nicolas Li’s research is on partisan gerrymandering in the United States. In a representative democracy, legislative districts are meant to align with local communities. The gerrymandering problem arises when partisan legislators themselves define districts that may not coincide with communities, which themselves are nebulously defined. Mr. Li’s research helps address this tension by measuring the degree that congressional district maps coincide with local communities. Observing that when people move, they often stay within their own community, he and his collaborators develop a novel new definition of community boundaries created by clustering neighborhoods using detailed data on hundreds of millions of moves. They use their methods to quantify how much politicians value partisan advantage relative to community.

Mr. Li’s research works at the intersection of urban economics and political economy, but he also does research in the area of econometrics. One of his projects asks how much can be learned about nonlinear causal effects using instrumental variables under minimal assumptions. In two separate papers, we highlight the importance of instrument relevance for estimating nonlinear effects, suggesting that machine learning approaches that increase the predictiveness of instruments may have a crucial role in learning about structural nonlinearities. During his visit he will offer a lecture at the LMU Empirical Economics Seminar entitle “Bunching as Quantile Treatment Effects with a Meta-Analytic Reassessment of Existing Externalities.”

Nicholas Y. Li is Assistant Professor at the The George Washington University, having previously worked as Economist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He holds a PhD in Economics, from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA in Global Development Economics from Boston University and a BA in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley.