Dr. Howell's research portfolio includes over 30 articles in leading journals (Nature Human Behavior, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Economic Geography, World Development, and Research Policy). His work focuses on designing, implementing, and evaluating policy interventions, advancing theories of human and firm behavior, and exploring drivers of economic development across rural, urban, and regional contexts. Dr. Howell has secured nearly $1 million in funding from diverse sources, including the U.S. National Science Foundation, the South Korean National Research Foundation, and the China National Natural Science Foundation. His research is internationally recognized, frequently cited in media and government reports. Dr. Howell's research expertise encompasses fieldwork experience, such as survey design and data collection, along with a strong emphasis on quantitative and computational social science methods, including causal inference, network analysis, machine learning, and spatial analysis. Dr. Howell's work contributes to several public policy domains, focusing on:

1. The impacts of ‘policy reversal’ shocks on local economic development, exploring the strategic responses and adaptability of households, firms, and communities.

2. The implications of industrial and place-based policies in promoting entrepreneurship and enhancing firm and regional competitiveness.

3. The role of social assistance programs in addressing ethnic disparities, supporting self-employment, and fostering occupational change.

Policy Reversals and Local Economic Development

This research examines the often-overlooked implications of `policy reversal' shocks, which involve the temporary suspension, permanent termination, or fundamental shift of existing policies or programs. It aims to identify critical design features to minimize undesirable and inequitable outcomes potentially induced by the policy change. From this lens, Dr. Howell has published on diverse topics ranging from investigating the effects of: (i) scaling down cash transfer programs on occupational change and local economic development; (ii) waiving matching mandates for public transport infrastructure on entrepreneurship, local investment, and economic recovery; (iii) dismantling state-owned enterprises on private-sector firm formation and success; and (iv) a discriminatory buyer tax on foreign investment behavior and housing affordability.

Competitiveness Policy and Firm Performance

This research combines natural experiments with large administrative micro-data to investigate the drivers of various dimensions related to local and global firm competitiveness. Dr. Howell has published extensively on the impact of economic reforms (e.g., FDI liberalization, market reforms) and industrial policies (e.g., tax reform, R&D subsidies) on firm performance (R&D spending, patenting, commercialization, total factor productivity, exports and outward FDI). Additionally, his research employs spatio-temporal network analysis of China's patent citations to study technological knowledge spillovers and their role in firm innovation and competitiveness. Dr. Howell's work suggests that economic geography and competitiveness policies significantly contributed to China's rapid rise in the global economy in the early 21st century.

Social Policy, Ethnicity, and Employment

For nearly two decades, Dr. Howell has been a pioneering force in studying ethnic disparities in China, a country with a large and often understudied ethnic minority population. His research is among the first to document the extent of country-wide ethnic disparities across a diverse set of household outcomes (migration, self-employment, occupational change, wages, income, energy poverty, carbon footprints, and adaptation to extreme climate events). His research investigates the role of cash transfers and other social assistance programs on reducing ethnic disparities, alleviate poverty, and increase household income. His work also explores ethnic disparities in access to finance for micro-business formation and implications for business performance.

Peking University

Meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, School of Economics, Peking University

UCLA

Fulbright Experience

Fieldwork Experience

Survey research team, Xinjiang University

Goal!!!

Early Life: Anthony's origins story is marked by early childhood challenges such as poverty, homelessness, foster care, and the repercussions of parental incarceration and untimely death. After being adopted by working-class kin at the age of 10, Anthony first began working at a GM automobile plant on the assembly line as a teenager. Tasks included long days standing at a conveyer belt and bristling rust off of car part screws, among other types of quality control. As local factories shuttered, including the one he worked at, Anthony observed firsthand the devastating consequences of regional economic decline, manifested by urban decay, unemployment, drugs and crime. In retrospect, it's evident that the roots of Anthony's research aspirations and inspirations are deeply entrenched in these early lived experiences, which nurtured an innate intellectual curiosity about issues related to employment, entrepreneurship, ethnicity, poverty, inequality, and the dynamics of regional economic development.

Getting into MSU: Despite the early life challenges and experiences he encountered, Anthony’s indomitable spirit propelled him to enroll in a local community college initially, and later, to secure an unexpected admission into MSU. As a first-generation college student, Anthony fortuitously discovered a supportive community of peers who helped to mentor him, significantly shaping his worldview and igniting within him a passion for learning and service. Anthony transitioned from factory and janitorial work to helping run a local soup kitchen and later the refugee development center in downtown Lansing. By his senior year he had increased his GPA from a 2.1 to a 3.5 and was hired as the lead instructor for a service-learning course for MSU freshman students. Anthony’s early academic and global experiences at MSU endowed him with the requisite intellectual frameworks that enabled him to not only reconcile with his past experiences and transcend childhood trauma, but also to harness these past adversities as a catalyst for profound personal growth and a relentless pursuit for social justice and policy advocacy.

International Service: Driven in part by a desire to escape his socioeconomic and geographical constraints, Anthony developed a strong interest at MSU to contribute to global community development. Through luck and determination, Anthony secured scholarships that allowed him to volunteer, research and live abroad, accruing unique real-world experiences that greatly enhanced his traditional academic studies. His global service projects spanned volunteering at a local economic development office in rural Ireland and multiple NGOs operating in impoverished neighborhoods in southern and central Mexico.

International Fieldwork: Anthony began his research career as an undergraduate student at MSU. He obtained a research grant to visit the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. In that capacity, Anthony designed and implemented his first survey instrument at a migrant skills-enhancement facility. The goal of the project was to understand to what extent the acquisition of new technical skills reduced employment barriers among Beijing’s informal migrant population.

For his Master’s thesis at MSU, Anthony combined several grants to conduct in-depth fieldwork in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, one of China’s most restive and difficult to access regions. Informed by a mixed-methods design, Anthony identified local contacts, trained local enumerators, and designed a statistical sampling design representative of urban service establishments in Urumqi and Kashgar, collecting nearly 2,000 surveys of Han, Hui, and Uyghur respondents. Analyzing the business survey data, his research findings were among the first to shed light on ethnic-based disparities in wages, self-employment, and mobility in the Chinese context.

UCLA and China Fulbright Experience: After being selected for UCLA Chancelor’s Prize to top PhD applicants, Anthony was admitted by UCLA into the top-ranked Geography department. Anthony received multiple nationally competitive fellowships, including being awarded a China Fulbright Award to conduct dissertation research on China’s competitiveness policy, innovation and entrepreneurship. During this period, he accessed valuable proprietary firm-level data at the PKU-Lincoln Institute. Harnessing his linguistic and statistical expertise, Anthony constructed measures of local industrial targeting initiatives by scraping public information from Chinese municipality websites. He integrated these measures with the firm-level data to investigate the implications of industrial policy on firm performance. In the later stage of his Fulbright, Anthony also was invited to participate in the China Household Ethnic Survey project (CHES), a significant initiative gathering a select group of international experts to join Chinese counterparts to collect and analyze the country’s first and only representative micro-data on China’s ethnic minority groups.

Peking University: The indelible impact of Anthony’s tenure as a faculty member at Peking University catalyzed a decade-long research agenda on China’s competitiveness policy on firm innovation, productivity and internationalization. During his tenure, he won multiple teaching and research awards, including from the prestigious National Science Foundation of China. Capitalizing on PKU’s proximity to Zhongguancun, often referred to as China’s “Silicon Valley,” Anthony immersed himself into Beijing’s tech scene. Through his position at PKU, he secured co-working space in Garage Cafe, a publicly-funded incubator on Innovation Way, witnessing firsthand the transformation of the area into a policy-induced innovation hub. Anthony also served in an advisory role for a student-led start-up company, and collaborated with partners at the Ministry of Science and Technology on international collaboration projects that fostered exchanges between start-ups in Silicon Valley and Zhongguancun.

Arizona State University: After nearly a decade of living and working abroad, Anthony decided to transition back to the U.S in 2019. Among multiple competing offers, Anthony accepted an academic appointment at Arizona State University, joining the top-ranked School of Public Affairs as an assistant professor of public policy and management. In 2022, he was promoted to Associate Professor, with tenure. Since then, Anthony accepted the appointment as Director for the Center of Technology, Data, and Society, exploring ways to secure funding to support research across the following areas: (i) entrepreneurship, innovation, and local economic and community development; (ii) societal implications of critical and emerging tech; and (iii) the role of U.S. science and technology policy to enhance US global competitiveness.