I am a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Perry World House. I received a PhD from the Department of Political Science at Stanford University in September 2025.
I study the causes and consequences of international conflict in historical perspective. My current research explores the relationship between warfare and popular demands for redistributive taxation and the effect of technological change on the frequency of warfare.
Before graduate school, I developed fraud detection algorithms for Mastercard. I hold an MS in computational and mathematical engineering from Stanford University and a BA in computer science and political science from Columbia University.
I can be reached by email at tchaouc@upenn.edu.
Working Papers
- Learning When to Fight: Technological Diffusion and Frequency of Conflict in Medieval Europe
- The Costs of War: World War I Fatalities and Demands for Progressive Taxation in Interwar Britain
Works in Progress
- Offensive Advantage and War: A Structural Approach
- Technological Change and Mutual Optimism
Abstract
Scholars have argued that international conflict is more frequent under offensive advantage, or when prevailing technological conditions make it relatively easier for states to capture territory than to defend it. However, both the mechanism that relates offensive advantage to conflict and the empirical validity of this relationship remain vague. In this paper, I construct a simple crisis bargaining model that incorporates the offense-defense balance as a parameter affecting the probability of victory in a conflict. I show that in equilibrium, the probability of war does not increase monotonically as offensive advantage grows. Instead, the equilibrium probability of war is minimized when the offense-defense balance equalizes the disputing states' costs of fighting. Moreover, using the model and data on the participants and outcomes of interstate disputes, I structurally estimate a value for the offense-defense balance for all decades between 1850 and 2020. This structural approach provides more granular estimates of the offense-balance and a measure of degree of the offensive or defensive advantage, rather than merely its direction.
Abstract
Does technological change make international conflict more likely? I argue that technological change can increase the risk of war by introducing uncertainty about the balance of power. New technologies complicate states’ private assessments of relative capabilities, leading to differing expectations about the outcome of war. I formalize this argument using a crisis bargaining model with two-sided incomplete information. In the model, states receive private noisy signals about the effect of a new military technology on the balance of power. The model shows that such uncertainty can lead to war, even the states have the same private assessments about the balance of power. Moreover, the model shows that this mechanism is most likely to produce conflict between states with relatively equal military power.
