The Hobby School of Public Affairs invites you to attend the Center for Public Policy speaker events.

Hobby School of Public Affairs
Center for Public Policy Speaker Series

Upcoming Speakers

Aaron R. Kaufman, Associate Professor at the New York University Abu Dhabi 

Date: December 1, 2025

Time: 12:00pm

Location: Heritage Room (201), Bates Hall 

Paper title: Are Firms Gerrymandered?

Abstract: We provide the first evidence that firms, not just voters, are gerrymandered. We compare allocations of firms in enacted redistricting plans to counterfactual distributions constructed using simulation methods. We find that firms are over-allocated to districts held by the mapmakers’ party when partisans control the redistricting process; maps drawn by courts and independent commissions allocate firms more proportionately. Our results hold when we account for the gerrymandering of seats: fixing the number of seats the mapmakers’ party wins, they obtain more firms than expected in their districts. Our research reveals that partisan mapmakers target more than just voters, shedding new light on the link between corporate and political power in the United States and opening new pathways for studying how mapmakers actually draw district boundaries.

About the speaker: Aaron R. Kaufman is an Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. He also holds affiliations with the Department of Politics and the Center for Data Science at New York University, the Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP), and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. His research interests leverage cutting-edge methods in computer science and causal inference to solve measurement problems in political science. He also produces open-source tools to help researchers work more efficiently. He is committed to research transparency and open science.