Welcome.

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Political Science at Stanford University. My subfields are comparative politics and political methodology. I am currently interested in the political economy of development, property rights and other institutional features, the effects of natural resources on governance, and elections as tools of accountability.

Contact

Department of Political Science
616 Serra Street
Encina Hall West, Room 316
Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-6044
Voice: 650-796-6327
Email: thomas.brambor(at)stanford.edu
http://www.stanford.edu/~tbrambor

To make an appointment, please check my calendar for available times.

Education


2005 - present Graduate Program Political Science, Stanford University
2009 Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Portuguese Language Program
2008 Middlebury College, VT, Intensive Summer Language Program in Portuguese
2004 Bachelor of Arts, New York University
        Summa cum Laude Economics with honors, Political Science

Research

Publications in Refereed Journals:

Brambor, Thomas, William Clark & Matt Golder. 2007. "Are African Party Systems Different?". Electoral Studies 26:2 315-323 [paper][replications]

Brambor, Thomas, William Clark & Matt Golder. 2006. "Understanding Interaction Models: Improving Empirical Analyses."Political Analysis 14:1, pp. 63-82.
[paper][webpage][replications][literature survey][code][standard errors]
- Reprinted in W. Paul Vogt. 2008. Selecting Research Methods. London: Sage Publications

Unpublished:

Brambor, Thomas & Joungwoo Park. 2004. "Fluctuations of International Student Flows to the United States: An Empirical Approach with Panel Data 1975-2000". Unpublished

Work in Progress:

Brambor, Thomas. 2008. "Local Governance in Brazilian Municipalities: Effects of Electoral Competition on Municipal Finance"

Brambor, Thomas. 2008. "Oil and Institutional Change: Is there a Resource Curse?" [paper]

R function (similar to STATA's "outreg" or "estout") to turn regression output into latex table. Only works for some models and is fairly rudimentary as of now. [outregTB.R]

Conference presentations:

Brambor, Thomas. 2009. "Resource Royalties in Brazil". Paper presented at the Stanford-Berkeley Comparative Politics Conference, Berkeley, CA, April 17, 2009

Brambor, Thomas. 2008. "Local Governance in Brazilian Municipalities: Effects of Electoral Competition on Municipal Finance". Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 3, 2009

Brambor, Thomas. 2008. "Oil and Institutional Change: Is there a Resource Curse?". Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 5, 2008

Brambor, Thomas, William Clark & Matt Golder. 2004. "Understanding Interaction Models: What We Thought We Knew But Obviously Didn't". Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 15, 2004

Awards, Grants, and Fellowships

2008-present Ric Weiland Family Graduate Fellowship
2005-2010 Stanford Graduate Fellowship
2009 Grant from Stanford Graduate Research Opportunity (GRO) Fund
2004 Robert B. Dow Award
2003 Murray Altman Prize in Economics
2003 Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund Grant for Honor's Thesis

Other


Refereeing:


Journal of Politics
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Statistics in Society
Comparative Political Studies
British Journal of Political Science
Electoral Studies

Research Assistantships:


Professor Michael Tomz, February - December 2006, Project: Historical development of Bond Markets in Germany and Switzerland

Teaching Assistantships:


Democracy Development, and the Rule of Law (PS114D, Undergrad) taught by Professor Michael McFaul and Professor Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Fall 2006

Political Methodology II (PS 350B, Grad) taught by Professor Simon Jackman, Winter 2007

Introduction to Comparative Politics (PS 4, Undergrad) taught by Professor David Laitin, Spring 2007

Comparative Democratic Development (PS 344, Undergrad) taught by Professor Larry Diamond, Winter 2008

Political Methodology III (PS 350C, Grad) taught by Professor Simon Jackman, Spring 2008

Links


Statistical:

  • Statistical Computing Resources at UCLA - Help for various computing packages (R, Stata, StatTransfer etc.), code re-doing the examples of many popular textbooks, plenty of examples etc.
  • Nathaniel Beck's homepage (NYU) - Quantitative Methods II has some good class notes, particularly on longitudinal data and maximum likelihood estimation
  • Gary King's homepage (Harvard) - Plenty of useful stuff, including some STATA and R add ons; particularly interesting for missing data, causal inference, and anchoring vignettes
  • Jan Box-Steffensmeier (OSU) - The person not to miss on duration analysis. Also has a great book (with Bradford Jones) on the subject. The web site for their book, including some lecture notes, data sets, and STATA code can be found here.
  • Charles Franklin (Wisconsin) - Maximum Likelihood Estimation; good set of lecture notes
  • Jeff Gill (UC) - Somegood stuff on Bayesian statistics
  • Simon Jackman (Stanford) -Various lecture notes, nice section on Bayesian statistics
  • Chris Zorn (Emory) - amazing lecture notes, can't locate his web site right now (after his move from Emory)
  • Matt Golder (FSU) - great MLE course modeled after Beck's (see above); provides links to various other lectures notes; quick overview for those looking for an overview of models beyond simple OLS
  • William Greene (NYU) - Lecture notes from his grad course on panel data
  • Paul Johnson (Kansas) - write-ups for methods lecture notes, all available in pdf and lyx (with Sweave)

Content:

  • Development Economics - This is a great web site to gain an overview of the field of development economics; run by has short summaries of many papers; site maintained by LSE student Masayuki Kudamatsu
  • Economics Lecture Notes - Great link page to lecture notes on Micro, Macro, Econometrics, Math for Econ, and some common software. May save you the occasional textbook.
  • New Institutional Economics - Intro to an interesting field with a links to useful data sets, a reading list for newbies, as well as other resources

Databases:

Large Datasets

Sources for Country Information

Non-academic - friends, family, and some random stuff

Friends

Michael Albertus
Matt Golder and Sona Golder
Marco Krondorf
Jed Stiglitz
Kendra Bischoff

Random stuff

Camera tossing - Make cool digital pictures by throwing your digital camera in the air. Don't know what I am talking about. Check it out!