I am a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Perry World House. I research the causes and consequences of military innovation. My primary research agenda investigates when and how technological change affects the likelihood of international conflict. A second line of work examines the political economy of military innovation, with a focus on how technology adoption influences political and economic inequality. I am also interested in historical political economy, and much of my research uses computational tools to construct novel historical datasets, which I analyze using modern causal inference methods and geospatial tools.
I received a PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2025. In addition, I hold an MS in computational and mathematical engineering, also from Stanford, and a BA in computer science and political science from Columbia University. Before graduate school, I developed fraud detection algorithms for Mastercard.
I can be reached by email at tchaouc@upenn.edu.
Working Papers
- Dividing the Costs of War: Conscript Fatalities and Demands for Progressive Taxation in Interwar Britain
- Revise and resubmit at International Organization
- Learning When to Fight: Technological Change and Conflict in the Gunpowder Revolution
- Revise and resubmit at the American Political Science Review
Work in Progress
- Offensive Advantage and War: A Structural Approach
- Technological Change and Mutual Optimism
- The Opportunity Cost of Military Transformation
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.
Abstract
A fundamental problem considered by military planners is how to divide limited funds between force readiness and modernization. Investing in new doctrine and technology may improve future capabilities but comes at the cost of reducing resources available for present conflicts. This paper studies the tradeoff between readiness and modernization by developing a dynamic model of conflict where states make endogenous investments in future military capabilities. The model shows that investment in modernization is a function of the distribution of power and relative efficiency in converting resources into military power. Finally, the model's predictions are assessed by fitting the model to new state-level data on investment in military research and development. This permits counterfactual estimation of how changes in the security environment influence investments in force modernization.
