Anthony's research portfolio includes more than 30 journal articles published in top general interest and field journals (Nature-Human Behavior, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, J. of Development Economics, J. of Urban Economics, J. of Economic Geography, J. of Regional Science, World Development, and Research Policy). Anthony has received funding support from multiple US federal agencies (Dep. of State, Dep. of Education, and Dep. of Educational and Cultural Affairs), National Science Foundation of China, National Academies of Sciences, and Asian Development Bank, among others. Anthony's work has gained international recognition both inside and outside of academia and is frequently cited in international media and government white papers. Spanning multiple social science disciplines, Anthony's research focuses on the design, implementation and evaluation of program and policy interventions, advancing theories of human and firm behavior, and understanding the drivers of rural, urban and regional economic development. Informed by a wide array of quantitative and computational social science methods (causal inference, networks, machine learning, and spatial analysis), Anthony's research sheds novel data-driven insights across three paired policy-theoretical domains:

(ii) the ramifications of ‘policy reversal’ shocks on local economic development, exploring community and household responses and adaptability.

(i) the role of government in bolstering entrepreneurship, innovation and knowledge spillovers through the use of various industrial and spatial targeting policy tools.

(iii) the socioeconomic, equity and sustainability effects of social and environment policy to promote spatial and economic mobility, and adaptation to extreme climate events.

Policy Reversal Shocks and Local Economic Development

This area of research shines a spotlight on the often-overlooked social and economic ramifications of `policy reversal' shocks. This emergent body of research identifies critical design features required to minimize undesirable and inequitable socioeconomic outcomes as existing programs and policies are temporarily abandoned or permanently terminated. In one study, Anthony relies on a quasi-experimental design to uncover the unintended socioeconomic implications of ceasing cash transfers after scaling-down a payments for ecosystem program. In another study, Anthony exploits an unprecedented policy abandonment experiment enacted as part of a financial rescue plan to isolate for the first time the role of matching mandates, normally imposed on locales to receive stimulus infrastructure, on local investment and the implications for economic recovery.

Competitiveness Policy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

This area of research relies on natural experiments applied to large administrative micro-data to explore drivers of firm innovation, taking into account the multi-scalar interactions between cities and firms. His research investigates the impacts of economic reforms and competitiveness policies (e.g. state-owned enterprise reforms, FDI liberalization, tax reform, research subsidies, preferential lending, spatial targeting, high-tech clusters) on firm innovation (R&D spending, new products, patenting) and global competitiveness (productivity, exports, outward FDI). One project looks at the role of expanding access to finance among small-scale entrepreneurs, and its role in mitigating ethnic-based differences in business performance. Other research relies on spatio-temporal network analysis and statistical modeling of China's knowledge space, constructed via patent citation linkages, to highlight the role of technological related knowledge spillovers as a key driver of Chinese firm innovation and competitiveness. Anthony's work argues that economic geography and competitiveness policy help explain China's rapid, unprecedented rise in the global economy.

Development Policy, Migration, Ethnicity, and Resilience

For nearly two decades, Anthony has arduously worked to develop the field of ethnic disparities research in China, a country with one of the largest yet understudied ethnic minority populations in the world. This area of research documents for the first time the extent and scope of ethnic-based disparities in China along various household dimensions (mobility, self-employment, wages, income, energy poverty, carbon footprints, and exit rates out of subsistence agriculture). A key aspect of his work looks at the role of development policies to help mitigate ethnic-based disparities, reduce poverty and inequality, and spur household income growth. One project, for instance, relies on a regression discontinuity design to investigate the equity-efficacy effects of cash transfers on ethnic household resilience and implications for climate migration. Another study relies on machine learning methods to evaluate the effects of a carbon tax on ethnic inequality, taking into account heterogeneous household abatement scenarios.

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.