I am an MA student in Economics at California State University, Long Beach (expected December 2026) and a UC Berkeley alumnus (BA Political Economy, 2023, Regents' Scholar).
My research applies structural and reduced-form econometric methods to illicit markets and platform economies — with a particular focus on the geography of digital drug trade, enforcement architecture, and the measurable signatures that criminal markets leave in transaction-level data.
Using 354,000+ listing-level observations from 10 darknet cryptomarkets collapsed to a bilateral panel, I estimate PPML gravity models and find that contiguity, common language, and colonial ties all suppress illicit trade — the inverse of every licit-goods result in the literature. An extensive–intensive margin decomposition shows vendors advertise into nearby markets at normal rates; realized volumes are what collapse. The most coherent interpretation is bilateral enforcement coordination raising interdiction risk on jurisdictionally familiar corridors.